Public Acts: Disruptive Readings on Making Curriculum Public

public acts

Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Curriculum Studies

Series Editors: William F.Pinar, Maria Morris, and Mary Aswell Doll PUBLIC ACTS: DISRUPTIVE READINGS ON MAKING CURRICULUM PUBLIC Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica R.Meiners, editors AGAINST COMMON SENSE: TEACHING AND LEARNING TOWARD SOCIAL JUSTICE Kevin Kumashiro

public acts disruptive readings on making curriculum public

edited by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica R.Meiners Foreword by Suzanne de Castell

RoutledgeFalmer NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2004 by RoutledgeFalmer 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by RoutledgeFalmer 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE http://www.routledgefalmer.com/ Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Public acts: disruptive readings on making curriculum public/ edited by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica R.Meiners. p. cm.—(Reconstructing the public sphere in curriculum studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-203-33704-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-94839-8 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-94840-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Community education—North America. 2. Critical pedagogy—North America. 3. Education—North America—Experimental methods. I. Ibáñez-Carrasco, J.Francisco (Jose Francisco), 1963– II. Meiners, Erica R. III. Series. LC1036. 8 .N67P83 2004 370.11′5—dc22 2004041869

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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Foreword Suzanne de Castell

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Introduction Making Knowledge in Public: Overturning an Audience Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco & Erica R.Meiners

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Section 1. Disruptive Desires 1. Poverty, Policy, and Research: Toward a Dialogic Investigation Amanda Boggan and Shauna Butterwick 2. Desire and Betrayal in Community-Based Research Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco 3. Waadookodaading Indigenous Language Immersion: Personal Reflections on the Gut-Wrenching Start-Up Years Mary Hermes 4. Trials and Tribulations for Social Justice Adriana E.Espinoza

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Section 2. Audiences to Participants 5. Theater Forum at the Urban Odyssey School: A Case Study Michael Sanders 6. Write it, Get it: Motivating Youth Writers Michael Hoechsmann 7. Take Two on Media and Race David Stovall 8. “When I close my classroom door…”: Private Places in Public Spaces Jennifer Jenson

69 79 89 102

Section 3. Public Acts 9. Working between University and Community: Shifting the Focus, Shifting the Practice

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Erica R.Meiners (with engagements from Salome Chasnoff and Roberto Sanabria) 10. How Research Can Be Made to Mean: Feminist Ethnography at the Limits 139 of Representation Patti Lather 11. How New Yorkers Said No to War: An Experiment in Message and Action 146 Chris Cuomo 12. Encounters with Memory and Mourning: Public Art as Collective Pedagogy 164 of Reconciliation Pilar Riaño-Alcalá Contributor Biographies

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is possible only with the intellectual labor of many contributors, their time and energy sequestered from family lives, work, and rush hour madness. Many of you, dear contributors, are our longtime allies and we thank you for your patience, insightfulness and for the work you continue to do. We also extend thanks to Routledge and to Catherine Bernard and Karen Wolny for their support of this work. Also deep thanks to Bill Pinar for his belief in this project, without which Public Acts would not have been feasible. Many contributed material and intellectual labor to complete this book: Wajiha Khan assisted with the index, Britt Permien generated fabulous graphic ideas, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá offered savy counsel, Shauna Butterwick and Amanda Boggan worked to inhumane deadlines, Laurie Fuller and John Peirson supported us at home and at work while working on this project. Finally, our sincere gratitude goes to the teachings of Celia Haig-Brown and to our dear Suzanne de Castell who has helped us with her wisdom and spirit here and always. We would also like to extend our thanks to Suzanne Lassandro and her staff. Erica In addition to the above, I thank Francisco and John for a generous, smart and joyful friendship. At Northeastern Illinois University, I deeply appreciate the ongoing support of the faculty and staff in the Department of Educational Leadership and Development, the rich conversations and institutional possibilities provided by the individuals in the Women’s Studies Program, and the political organizing of the students, faculty and staff in the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Alliance. Chicago friends are sustaining, including Ken Addison, Tim Barnett, Salome Chasnoff and the Beyondmedia women, Dave Feiner, Fran Royster, Ann Russo, Roberto Sanabria, and Laura Wiley. The entire St. Leo’s network moves me in important ways—thank you for this opportunity. Outside of Chicago, Jodi Jensen, Dick Higginbotham, the Chicago/NYC/Michigan music festie gals, Joan Ariki Varney, and Fong Hermes continually reshape my thinking and practices. My mom Denise, cousin Dirk, and sister Elena, and my nieces Stacia, Heather, and Holly May remind me that being Canadian counts. As it cannot be mentioned enough, I thank Laurie Fuller for supporting and challenging me, and for her love.

Francisco Many people gave me a nurturing space and breathe energy into me so I can do the strange and selfish work of thinking and writing. Erica Meiners, you came to me with this idea and, as your essay attests, I fell a bit in love…thank you and Laurie for trusting me. At home, John R.Peirson has been here all along, a most notable lover for someone as intense and complicated as I can be…and with a short life expectancy—we still have more to do/live through. Thanks to my mentor, Suzanne de Castell; I inherited your true tenacity and vocation for this work, I even inherited your moments of doubt and I still learn from you all the time; thanks to my towers of strength, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá and Barry Wright, to my dear friends, Jennifer Jenson, Michael Hoechsmann and his lovely family, Thomas Kerr and his family, and, last but not least, thanks to the indomitable Oline Luinenburg. Thanks to my colleagues in community work, all the folks at the Canadian Working Group on HIV and Rehabilitation (CWGHR), especially the wonderful Elisse Zack, Stephanie Nixon, and Louis-Marie Gagnon. Thanks to all the folks at BC Persons With Aids Society, in particular to the adorable Britt Permien. Thanks to Rick Marchand, Andrew Baker, and Terry Trussler at the Community Based Research Centre in Vancouver; to Beth Easton in Toronto, Daryn Bond, and Margaret Ormond in Manitoba for engaging in great work and conversations with me.

FOREWORD

Suzanne de Castell MOTHER: A photo of my girl, my daughter; FATHER: This here is our girl, it’s the only keepsake I have; MOTHER: That we have. —“Encounters with Memory and Mourning” Chapter 12, this volume Public Acts delivers a power-packed, behind-the-scenes look at a diverse collection of unorthodox educational interventions, from new schools to street classes to communitybased research to traveling memory-museums. Sawy, creative, passionate, and, yes, angst-ridden—tortured by the failure that is inevitable when you try too much with too little, when the stakes are too high and shots too long. This motley crew of young educators, filmmakers, AIDS researchers, ethnographers, counselors, journalists, poverty activists, and academics blur much more than just genres to demonstrate both the perils and the promise of working “out of bounds” in public places on public problems, inventing, always too-hurriedly and “on the fly,” a more truly public discourse with which to extend education’s reach. In so doing, they entreat, argue, cajole, seduce, and, yes, deceive, betray, conceal, and entice universities, funding bodies, school administrators, parents, community members, and even their co-researchers to invent and support new forms of teaching and learning in places too-long neglected, for people too often dismissed. Breathless? Agitated. Blurred. Fractured. This is what educational “multitasking” looks like when it puts down the book and steps outside the classroom to see how knowledge is otherwise made. Given to their readers are new programs for throw-away kids, unsupported parents, communities lost to violence and despair, the sick and addicted, those nominated by poverty and/or racism to swell the ranks of the educational system’s structurally preordained “failures.” The authors are the “teachers” who take responsibility for the creation of those programs, as well as for their myriad failures, frustrations, and weaknesses. What the reader is meant to hear here is what you can (can’t you?) only read between the words, between the lines, between and across the speakers. Take a minute: what is going on in these texts, between them, among and within them? What are you reading here, and why?

What this congregation of fragments of a larger public praxis asks from its readers is a more ironic, a more inverting and self-reflecting, a more contradiction-ridden and complicit, and, yes, of course, a more “critical” reading. This is a collection of “disruptive readings,” however, that, unlike its more “‘normal” counterparts, does not ask simply to be read, even to be “listened to.” What these activist educators are asking us for here is far more than an audience: this is a book that demands of its audience that they become, themselves, participants in the heart-pounding, perilous, but unashamed commission of public acts of knowledge creation, taking our desires out of the privacy of our own homes and making knowledge in public. And it gives us more than a few graphic illustrations of how to do that. This book is a little raw? Maybe so. But where is the Martha Stewart of educational activism?1 How do we do work of this kind? What are our models for “getting it right”? Nowhere in teacher education courses do we find out (or do we put out) how to do the work of this very public education, which, in our proper work as dutiful intellectuals, we have so well and so thoroughly critiqued, whose flaws and weaknesses, whose petty vengeances, and whose deeply ingrained prejudices we know all too well. Faced with that, the fact that “No Child Left Behind” should name America’s current educational agenda, has a kind of churning visceral irony. How, beyond the kind of academic criticism that seems to leave so much untouched, does public education’s tradition of discrimination, exclusion, and neglect get remade? Where in educational theory and research courses do we get a decent look at how things are made to work, how meaning, significance, and “findings” are, inevitably and unavoidably, “forged,” and against what odds. And when might we then ever consider the heretical possibility that this partisan and purpose-driven work of fabrication may just be all right, and what matters, most of all, is why we do what we do in education’s name? Why is this flawed, made-up, cliffhanging work getting attempted and engaged and enacted? What purposes drive educators to work in unconventional sites, making strange knowledges in such altered ways? This collection supplies a number of examples of why, compelling accounts of the purpose that drives eccentric educational work, each giving a close-up view of the ways these writers, together with others, have struggled to devise good—where “good” means much more than just “effective”—ways of making knowledge with and within communities in ways that they could hope might bring a better world, in whatever grand or limited way. The range of situations and programs is exemplary: there is work here about Aboriginal language schools; antipoverty activism; a youth news agency; subversive genderwork in public schools; public arts and community healing in Medellín, Colombia; participatory activist research with queer street kids; a high school for women who are former inmates…this book embraces all of these. What models, then, has this kind of “public” education to offer to its traditional counterpart? Three things: rights, agency, and reasons. These essays take for themselves the right to speak up about systemic problems in the public sphere, the right to notice how many members of this purported “public” are left standing on its sidelines. This is nothing new. We already know how “public” education—alongside of and bolstered by poverty legislation, immigration policy, housing and health policy, gender politics, racism, and the U.S. justice system—makes recurrent national patterns of failure and success already readable from income statistics.

Public Acts documents how variously located educators have paid attention to these structural weaknesses in the public sphere and the ways in which, in a series of very localized, highly particular sites, they have tried to custom design and build educational spaces and tools and resources to repair, to strengthen, and to support those sidelined publics, while knowing that what’s needed is a rebuild, a complete overhaul; that’s something small-scale, locally driven, and locally based programs will never have the muscle to accomplish. This, therefore, is also what you will read in this collection: the moments of grave doubt, a palpable sense of alienation and confused complicity, the frustration of trying to make education better for too many children—too many people— left behind, and knowing that this is far larger than any local program can tackle. And yet… It’s the “and yet…” that gives this book its hope, its rich promise, its greatest value to educators both in and out of schools, because this collection opens up to us one example after another in which the impossible magnitude of the job ahead was not allowed to extinguish the commitment that only the irrationality of desire could fuel. This book details the many (and often insidious) ways that desire works in and through social justice-oriented research and educational work. Describing one such complicit trajectory, Mike Hoechsmann’s perceptive and optimistic rereading of the coalition of consumer desire and activism in “Write It, Get It: Motivating Youth Writers” characterizes the flawed, infected, compromised, and contradictory character of what so much of this book looks for: [A] more flexible way of conceiving social change, a more inclusive emancipatory agenda that does not turf the uninitiated out on their ears for not living up to prevailing political orthodoxies…. Impure criticism resists preachy disdain and looks for the sites of possibility in seemingly contradictory worldviews. (Chapter 6, this volume) These essays speak of the need to rethink, as well as the strategic and tactical coalitions we make, the educational tools we use, and the places where public and private collide. Most of all, they speak about agency and how to advance it, about respect and how we might learn to feel and to show it, and about reasons why, against steep odds, this grounded, committed, community-building work is one way—not, maybe, the “right” way but, maybe, for now, the best way—democratic and publicly reparative educational work can be done. Because our society has become, let’s politely say, “stopped up”—its democratic ideals lodged in some painful mid-section, its practitioners confined like irritants within distended and bloated structures of performance and accountability whose work is to discard and silence so many among us and leave those of us who are still moving traumatized into inaction by our own complicity—we are not just unwillingly with in, we are a willing part of this very system. As the survivors and the perpetrators of this brutal educational regime, part of whose privilege it is to master the tools of intellectual criticism with which to see more clearly what education has made of this democratic public sphere, we pick among our tools for the means to tear down and rebuild, not quite sure even what or whom we might be looking for. Maybe it is partly the tools themselves, maybe remorse over what we have done with them. Consider this view of its subjects, from outside the schoolgrounds:

When I edit a tape I watch them making the same gesture or smile hundreds of times. I tend to fall in love with them…. That is part of what prepares me to represent them in the very best way possible. I don’t know how useful that would be for an academic researcher or an educator. You are needing to be more critical. Maybe you are needing to hate the subjects. Maybe the focus needs to change? —Salome Chasnoff, filmmaker; Chapter 9, this volume Just maybe it does…. I’ve always thought that what Western society lacks is the capacity to grieve. That’s my perspective, I’m aware it may seem like the product of a depressed mind. —Amanda, single mother living in poverty, student, and anti-poverty activist; Chapter 1, this volume As an erstwhile young academic activist, Tom Walker, very insightfully pointed out, sometimes for teachers and students in our public school classroom, Monday morning means Monday mourning. To make a new educational beginning in the middle of an unjust world, to find the reconciliation we all need in order to move on, to help create a more engaged and productive public life both within and among our selves, we may well need to make place and space for mourning and for memory, to sift among the fragments of places and lives and knowledges and selves that have been broken and cast aside, for the means to devise what Pilar Riaño-Alcalá in Chapter 12 characterizes as a civic pedagogy: In sum, a civic pedagogy needs to work with—not avoid or deny— suffering and mourning…. …Maybe we need to remember what—and who—our public education has induced us to forget in order to get on with the business of finding—or even just forging—a better and more just world. As Monique Wittig long ago advised Les Guérrieres, women who would be warriors: But remember, always remember And failing that, invent. One last word: as with so much academic work, what drives it and feeds it and gives it life is invariably far more personal that the text tells, and this book is no exception. I hope that, even as I hope you see its flaws and foibles, its inner contradictions, doubts, and barely suppressed treacheries and conceits, you will also find something here to bring greater clarity and joy to your own heart and your own work. For many of these are people I know, love, have taught, have worked beside; they are the young ones from

whom we may not only hope for great things, but from whom we can see great things in the making: Right Here.

Note 1. This space is for a reader-composed note on what can go wrong when you make very difficult things look way, way too easy.

INTRODUCTION MAKING KNOWLEDGE IN PUBLIC: Overturning an Audience Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica R.Meiners This project began as an attempt to collect articles written by activist educators, researchers, and artists who are involved in local projects for social change. With flagrant immodesty, we solicited articles that could report and/or analyze various instances of public organization and mobilization to offer insights into local practices or “sets of technologies”—tactics not totally devoid of strategy—used to facilitate social change. Reading through the work we received, we realized that the articles have captured, through our somewhat naïve initial longing to report on work that moves across and between university and community spaces, varied attempts to do the brazen, messy, flawed, and engaged work to produce public knowledge. The work described in each chapter struggles, as the title of this series suggests, to reconstruct the public sphere and to do so by theorizing and/or chronicling the moves undertaken by authors to shift from the position of spectator, disengaged researcher, or authoritative teacher to an engagement with social environs as a participant. Our contributors take seriously sociologist Gordon’s observation that those in privileged economic and social positions in Western postindustrial nations actively chose a response of indifference or inaction to the social and economic crises that unfold. “Today, the nation closes it eyes neither innocently nor without warning… What does it mean for a country to chose blindness as its national pledge of allegiance.” (Gordon 1997, 207). Rejecting indifference, chapters in this collection suggest that reconstruction of what constitutes the public sphere also requires praxis and recalibrations in the knowledge production apparatus. The chapters in this book insist that acts of making knowledge public (to tell) and making public knowledge (to be seen) are directly located in everyday practices of social and political life. As this collection is generated from lived practices, and as these chapters work to compel individuals (the authors/desired readers) who are situated in academic and nonacademic positions to give testimony and take ownership for what they have seen or done, no one is to sit in a theoretical armchair. Authors are, as they strongly manifest it, close to the work, but sometimes “too close for comfort”: Riaño-Alcalá’s description and analysis of the potential fruits of the horrid gestures of Colombian violence in the creation of a “memory-bus” in Medellín; Espinoza’s work to engage a mainstream Canadian audience to witness the ongoing struggles for social justice in Latin America; Jenson’s ethnographic feminist-activist recalibration of the “tired” terrain of gender equity in technology; Hermes’s vibrant labor to sustain the Ojibwe language in the Ojibwe nation. With tenacity and a sense of urgency, as editors, we desire that this collection lures (un) suspecting readers to query, What am I doing? What am I thinking? And why?

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This transdisciplinary scholarship is an implicit and intimate demand for new audiences to become, as Sanders states in Chapter 5, describing the Forum Theatre experiences of urban youth, “participant-actors” (inspired in the Brazilian educational tradition pioneered by Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal). Transgressing perilous borders between ethnographic and other social scientific writing and journalism and fiction/nonfiction writing/texts, and then venturing out into experimental textual realms, the transdisciplinary work of Public Acts charts the authors’ experiences of and desires to overturn the audience into participants who “do something about it.” Authors chronicle how the desire to make material improvements in our own lives and/or the lives of those marginalized leads us to do something about injustice, poverty, illiteracy, and civic apathy and to turn the difficult trick of seducing “audiences” to be “participants,” which implies deeper degrees of agency, responsibility, and accountability. Writing about our tricks provides examples of militant tactics to blur the lines between the traditional fields/disciplines. These tactics are, if “organic “not spontaneous. Hoechsmann and Stovall, for example, offer sharp descriptions of empowering youth pedagogical projects temporarily thriving in the bowels of a capitalistic machine, the mainstream media, that desires and feeds from the comodification of youth. Their activism crosses disciplinary borders and compels readers to rebel in a praxis—albeit temporary—theory into action that is still potential and possible in the “belly of the beast” of capitalism. The pieces of this collection may preach to the convert, but they simultaneously document moments where authors move into the streets to preach in-your-face to the passersby. We gathered this collection of essays for us, for our benefit—okay, we come clean on this. Then, we thought…what would make others read it, act on it? As the ethnographic film theorist and activist Jane Gaines points out, “[T]he question of political action is unanswerable without exact knowledge of the political conditions in the world of our audience” (2000, 89). Thus, the chapters in this book endeavor to describe and explain the political conditions for each project, what binds each public act together, and what makes each act terribly fragmented. Each chapter works to breach, theorize, and live the gap between the visionary ideas for a grand political and social change and the nittygritty, everyday, often grunt work to achieve those visionary ideas. While some chapters in this book underline solutions and outcomes, more often the authors work with uncertainty and anxiety to deploy public practices of resistance/ rebuilding/regeneration. As this book provides detailed descriptions and brings theory to bear on varied forms of public pedagogical acts, we suggest that it can offer “living templates”—imperfect organic curricula/methodology—to inform and inspire tenacious practices in diverse communities. Most of the authors in this collection came to maturity in the age of political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s, and we know that radical action is somewhat vague and problematic: it can be vain and selfrighteous. Partially, the negotiated public actions described within this collection could be characterized, as Cvetkovich (2003) describes the activism of ACT UP, as lived, practical, and responses to trauma that are acted through, acted up, and acted out. The distinction between mourning and melancholy in AIDS activism holds for authors in this collection when making any kind of knowledge public.

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I refuse the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholy that leads Dominick LaCapra, for example, to differentiate between “working through,” the successful resolution of trauma, and “acting out” the repetition of trauma that does not lead to transformation. Not only does the distinction often seem tautological—good responses to trauma are cases of working through, bad ones are cases of acting out—but the verbal link between “acting out” and ACT UP suggests that activism’s modes of acting out, especially its performative and expressive functions, are a crucial resource for responding to trauma. (2003, 434) Melancholy is the “still life” equivalent of mourning, as melancholy leads us to create curricula as a series of postcards from the war front about deviancy, risk, suffering, and other “social ills.” Mourning becomes taking a kind of responsibility for our agency— immediate or removed—in those ills and working through a committed public response by acting out on it. Sometimes our public, community-based pedagogical/research attempts at acting out are successful and/or benign, sometimes they are failures and harmful; they are rarely neutral. Authors in this collection know that taking steps toward acting out is problematic—disgusting to some, as mourning and acting out can be such spectacles—as it involves making knowledge in public. The experiences presented in the collection evidence that any enactment of radical praxis is anxious, self-conscious, somewhat cynical and self-serving, and layered with private pain and investments in the outcome of the act (an academic version of the “money shot”?). A NOTE ON CONTRIBUTORS The vision for this book was generated in the problematic every day: how folks in our own communities struggle to make knowledge in ethical and professional ways, some in the academic rat race, some in other contexts. These are friends with whom we have shared rooms of our own: classrooms (as classmates and co-teachers), boardrooms and church basements (as allies in local and global work for justice), health care institutions as (in) patient activists and caregivers, and in the nonprofit voluntary sector as volunteers or frontline workers. These are friends and allies who have demonstrated to us and to others, as Linda Tuhiwai-Smith states, that they can actually do something: they have a good heart and they fix generators. Whose research is it? Who owns its? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will results be disseminated? While there are many researchers who handle such questions with integrity, there are many more who cannot, or who approach these questions with some cynicism, as if they are a test merely of political correctness. What may surprise people is that what may appear as the “right” most desirable answer can still be judged incorrect. These questions are simply part of a larger set of judgments on criteria that a researcher cannot prepare for, such as: Is her spirit clear? Does he have a

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good heart? What other baggage are they carrying? Are they useful to us? Can they fix up our generator? Can they actually do anything? (1999, 11) Our admission of the blatant conflict of interest that grounds this collection opens us up to an intriguing critique of inclusion/exclusion. Isn’t it precisely this “asking your friends” that maintains the reproduction of exclusionary communities in academia? Isn’t this precisely what we subalterns critique as the “the old boys network” that recycles their tales in various anthologies? As editors and as contributors, we each struggle with these tensions surrounding our relationship to our institutional location. Diane Fuss reflects in her introduction to Inside/Out (1991)—referring here to the creation of “gay studies”—on the tensions that engulf participation in institutional practices. The issue is the old stand-off between confrontation and assimilation: does one compromise oneself by working on the inside, or does one shortchange oneself by holding tenaciously to the outside? Why is institutionalization overwritten as “bad’ and anti-institutionalization coded as “good”? Does inhabiting the inside always imply cooptation?… And does inhabiting the outside always and everywhere guarantee radicality? (5) This collection transgresses some of the existing borders and yet we fully acknowledge that by doing so we set others. By remapping familiar territory, borders become possible horizons. Authors in Public Acts are insiders to academic discourses and institutions as professors, graduate students and researchers, and others are outsiders as communitybased researchers, activists, artists, educators, and research subjects. We occupy a multiplicity of positions (we would not have it any other way), and the conflict of interest is made public at every turn. We accept this risk of inclusion/exclusion with a belligerent spirit, much in the same way that people who are visible (or sexual) minorities frequently inhabit committees, boards of directors, staff rooms, artistic projects, or university departments, as “tokens.” We aim to cause trouble by being there, by simply occupying the space. We accept this risk of inclusion/exclusion as we acknowledge and highlight the work of the contributors in this collection, many of whom have negotiated a complicated professional path, often alone and “queer” in more ways than one, through academic studies, poorly funded community-based social and economic justice projects, job searches or difficult promotions. In an ongoing effort to move physically and intellectually from the passivity of audiences to an engagement as participants, we embrace the challenge these ungainly moves create, and work—Public Acts being our slight of hand—to interrogate others and ourselves. NOTES ON THE RISKS OF DISRUPTIVE NARRATIVES Stories have the tendency to insinuate themselves into audiences, inviting intimacy and familiarity where perhaps none is to be found. The narrative or descriptive apparatus of some of these articles could, as the literary theorist Sommer suggests (1999), seduce readers not into action or participation but into collapsing the highly particular projects,

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individuals, and communities detailed in this collection into encompassing generalizations about “humanity.” These representations could teach us to understand “ourselves” and humanity better. Sommer offers clues to understand the pitfall of universalization: The paradox of striving for complete understanding is that it misunderstands the particularity of its object. To understand is to establish identity; and this requires conceptualization that generalizes away otherness. Identifying, therefore, turns out to be a trap at two levels: empathetic identification violates the other person; and ontological identification eliminates particularity for the sake of unity. (27) A reading of endemic “indifference” (Owens 1992) that erases the specificity of the material lives at stake in each of these chapters is a byproduct we actively seek to disrupt. So, what will be our response to the violence of indifference? In our era of information saturation, media uses pain, suffering, and desire to distract and to create spectacular roadkill out of poverty, deviancy, and violence—the mediahyped Columbine school murders and the Mathew Shepard bloodshed flicker in our mind. Representation itself has a capacity to turn many into scared, apathetic, indifferent audiences (Sontag 2002), hence contributor Cuomo’s deliberate move into a genre she believes will compel an audience to become a participant and Espinoza’s careful collaborative community organizing to script avenues for mainstream North Americans to witness (and accept partial ownership of) the ongoing legacy of the violent dictatorships in Central and South America. Other authors, in response to this indifference, also work to reengage in the care for irony that struggles at every step to upset “the careful work of disattention” to those who are stigmatized (Goffman 1963, 41). Our authors use this pain, suffering, and desire to generate hope, to remember. These authors engage with the questions posed by Linda Tuhiwai-Smith; they offer to fix our generators and work to “fix” our imagination, to shape a material practice—what we are able to do to counteract the violence of indifference: public art, community tribunals, youth newspapers, community-based research, etc. Chapters demonstrate the use of the raw material of pain and violence to do research and teaching—knowledge in public— that works to make a material difference in our lives and the lives of others. Yet another philosophical question mobilizes us, because, if we admit that we perilously circumvent the absolute scientific notion of primum non nocere, what are we left with to protect others and protect ourselves? What is the ethic that we adhere to— maybe the postmodern research ethics of “harm reduction”? Is this different from the ethics of universities and other public institutions now deeply concerned with legal liability? Who are we protecting, really? The Odgen case puts this issue in relief. “Ogden, a former criminology graduate student, had sought financial support for his defence of the issue of confidentiality, related to his research on euthanasia and assisted-suicide in persons with AIDS, before a coroner’s court in 1994. During the proceedings, Ogden refused to provide information, citing academic freedom and privilege.” (SFU New, July 1988) The university negelected to support this graduate student as its interest initially lined up with legal liability first, and second with freedom of academic thought. The ways in which social scientific research on humans is conducted in Canada was greatly

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impacted by this David and Goliath epic—illustrating that there is a great risk in narratives that disrupt the violence of indifference. The writing in Public Acts suggests several directions that this new ethic of making knowledge might travel. If indeed primum non nocere does not necessarily apply, at least not in the way it used to, in the ways we were trained to believe and to behave, if we indeed admit that research subjects, students, participants, teachers, contributors, and readers will get hurt no matter what we do (unless we don’t do it, and that is not an option any longer), our most ethical option is to cause the least possible damage by telling the “best” possible story there is to tell about making (public) knowledge (in) public. The varying textual strategies (narrative, theory, theater) offered by contributors signify representational (and epistemic) tensions surrounding how this story should be crafted (often to move this endemic indifference). In crafting this collection, we refused the option to pump out our own “soft-core” nonintimidating brand of redemptive stories about pedagogy and research. While neatly sewn educational stories may contribute to the creation of more traditional “audiences,” we argue that redemptive stories are a form of benign indifference: they do no harm because the representation does nothing at all. Thus, the narratives contained in Public Acts strive to refuse the airbrush of indifference and universality, characteristic of neoliberalism and prevalent in post-positivist responses to social research. For example, Hermes’s “gut-wrenching” narrative of the complicated work to keep an indigenous language movement alive is not a project that can be easily replicated, and the pain that echoes in the story actively resists generalizations or the easy closure that so often accompanies narrative. Our insistence on the peripheral and gritty contents of this book stems from dissatisfaction (some may say bitterness) with the optimistic present where what is disabled, queer, immoral, and not white has been dealt at best with polite indifference, at least in mainstream education. We question the methods and desires of the production of new knowledges that scaffold and coat this indifference and simultaneously worry that we also risk the production of this indifference through our reproduction of “mainstream” organizational vices—we invite our friends—but we have worked to not offer them the security of the theoretical armchair. This betrayal leads our discussion on a “new ethics”—if such a thing could exist. This ethics underlines the importance of enacting a clear resistance to redemptive theories and narratives (those that do no harm because they do nothing at all)—even as/if we fail. If we die, we want to be buried vertically, head first. And these ways of dying (perhaps a form of partly juvenile bungee jumping? partly sanctimonious martyrdom?) bring us to the last theoretical inquiry in our introduction, the question of desire. Desire is tremendous and chaotic, it makes one speak in tongues that are not one’s own, it places us and others at risk while it promises valor. The worst we can do for others, we offer, is not to engage with desire in making public our knowledge: do not choose silence. A NOTE ON DESIRE To complicate matters and to document how complicated matters of public pedagogy/research are, our readers—you—will be enticed to be reacquainted with a bent that often receives polite lip service in the field of education: desire. This book

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documents desire as the motivation to read, write, and converse our lived political, professional, and personal experience: the desire to “perform” acts of pedagogy and research—making knowledge public—that are often rabidly political and personal. Why do we get into activism or community-based partnerships? The desire for a collective healing and movement of political and social accountability moves Espinoza out of the world of therapeutic discourse into active agency in the political sphere; the desire for an “ethical” representation of the experience of activism and pain that surrounded 9/11/2001 moves Cuomo to experiment with a performative discourse that can capture affect and multiplicity—not traditional Anglo-American philosophy. If there is no money or glory, just trouble, only ethical quicksand in making knowledge public these days—then why? Why engage with “it” at all? Why risk academic suicide, or worse, no academic “act” at all? Following Sandoval’s work in Methodology of the Oppressed, in which she identifies desire as a/the meaningful force behind “revolutionary social change” (“‘hope’ and ‘faith’ in the potential goodness of some promised land”) (2000, 140), Ibáñez-Carrasco builds on this definition to explain how—to paraphrase Foucault’s notion of desire—one can and must deploy desire to overturn missionary positions. This collection invites you, dear reader, to grapple with some prickly questions: what might this revolutionary desire resemble? How might this revolutionary desire be instigated, theorized, or enacted? What shapes does this revolutionary and fluid desire adopt? And, most important, what is left for the local communities to use/remember? This collection engages this desire through the representation of a series of dirty little acts, sometimes self-indulgent, often earnest, but always necessary. In closing, our chapters leave stains that are dead giveaways of our sweet and sour handlings to make knowledge public. We argue that domestic and localized tactics are sexier and more enticing to the eyes, the palate, and the energy of community-based pegagogues, activists, students and researchers. However, we are also aware that any reversal of missionary positions and any mention of desire involves taking the risk of not being taken…taken seriously, that is, or not even be looked at/seen (academic suicide?). Hence, we had vigorous discussions regarding the inclusion of “unorthodox” material in this collection. Why can’t professors write like professors? Why do they want to be artists, playwrights, or activists? Genres, formats, and languages are being subverted, Mikhail Bakhtin’s prophecy of heteroglossia is realized, and even we have a hard time dealing. THE SECTIONS The first section of the collection, Disruptive Desires, speculates openly about the motivations that move educators, community leaders, researchers, and artists to meet in crummy rooms or in boardrooms and strategize curricula to move groups of individuals for joint concerns or commonly defined interests and investments. These are rooms where the beautiful, bold, and ugly of interests meet and curricula is pieced together, divvied up in tasks to be attempted later, and often classified by other names such as “action plans” or “protocols.” Curricula and research exist in hybrid forms and under other guises. Chapters in this section engage the desires that lead these authors into

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research, projects, and activism and the negotiated relationships, and the deep betrayals, that can emerge from this work. As Boggan and Butterwick, Ibáñez-Carrasco, Hermes, and Espinoza outline in the chapters that open this collection, activist pedagogical and research work engages with risk and betrayal. Audiences to Participants, the second section, considers the shifting consequences as authors move from being students and researchers to actors with emotional and political investments in whatever public work they pursue. The creation of an audience is not a natural occurrence; it is a painstaking collaboration between cultural workers (teachers, ethnographers, artists, popular educators) and fragmented audiences. What texts are produced from the work we do? Can the story of falling prey to desires in one’s field be told in ways other than the sensationalistic or smarmy? (Fallen—frequently female— teachers such as Mary Kay Letourneau to easily become demonized and sanctioned media products where the stories told about their illicit acts and desires insist upon a kind of normalcy that actively works to foreclose other readings.) How can we tell stories about curricular and research knowledge public—the relationships with volunteers and graduate students can be easily demonized and sanctioned. How can we tell stories about radical pedagogical and investigative work without being stereotyped as deviants? When and how do deviants get to tell stories? What is the place of deviant tales in curricular and research knowledge? In the closet? In this collection, none of us, the contributors, will make the tabloid press headlines but we are not exempt of the risks of appearing nagging, idealistic, soft, populist, unconventional, in other words, “deviants”. What “new” conceptions of old practices evolve out of these choices of audiences, writing practices, and alliances? Sanders starts the section squarely locating the desire for participation in his description of an urban youth theater project that works to transform the lives of youth. Hoechsmann opens temporarily fraught possibilities for imagining “new” physical audiences for the pressing political and social issues of youth. In furtive contrast, Jenson’s piece tells us about the need to generate new audiences and new queries for the “old” problem of gender equity in education as she charts her own ambiguities passing between practices as feminist activist, a graduate student, and an ethnographer. Indeed, new audiences and participants emerge as they are engaged (or not) in the dramatic curricular/methodological scenarios presented to them. This section aims to contribute to the creation of the tenacious engagement of participants, not in one spectacular sweep but through fragile steps. The third section, Public Acts, offers descriptions of projects/ actions/organizations that (dramatically) go public. The chapters by Meiners, Lather, Cuomo, and Riaño-Alcalá chronicle the histories and the locations that shape the origins and the social, group, and individual dynamics that animate the public acts. The projects described in this section are as textured as the topography they attempt to chart. Meiners charts the need for a shift in “research” through a layered chronicle of her work in and with two community-based projects that seek to publicly address issues and people in the prison industrial complex. Both Lather and Cuomo explore “experimental” feminist ethnographic practices: to represent the lives and agency of HIV-positive women, and to represent the layered multiplicity of a movement for peace and justice. With seemingly oppositional discursive acts—an engagement within theoretical terrain and a move into a performative discursive field—Lather and Cuomo offer (at least) two tactical strategies to create public acts that

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have the possibility to ignite social and political change. We juxtapose these differing methodological moves with intent, to illustrate the range of “academic” responses generated from a desire for radical praxis. This section is fiercely closed by RiañoAlcalá’s anthropological report of a civic literacy and artistic work in one of the toughest barrios of Medellín, Colombia, that moved people from witnessing and perpetrating violence to an ethical engagement with memory. Chapters surely do not entice other pedagogues and researchers to mimic the tactics and strategies offered step by imperfect step, if they dare to try; rather, each author offers a description of public acts, that transgress the physical, disciplinary, and political boundaries of the university. REFERENCES Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. Legacies of trauma, legacies of ACTIVISM: ACT UP’s lesbians. In Loss, edited by D.Eng and D.Kazanjian. Los Angeles: California University Press. Fuss, Diane. 1991. Inside/out: Lesbian theories, gay theories. New York: Routledge. Gaines, Jane. 2000. Political mimesis. In Collecting visible evidence, edited by J.Gaines and M.Renon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Owens, Craig. 1992. Beyond recognition: Representation, power, and culture, edited by Scott Bryson et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sommer, Doris. 1999. Proceed with caution when engaged by minority writing in the Americas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. SFU News, July 1998. http://www.%20sfu.ca/mediapr/sfnews/1998/July2/ogden.html Sontag, Susan. 2002. Looking at war. The New Yorker (December 9). Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London & New York: Zed Books.

Section 1 Disruptive desires

1 POVERTY, POLICY, AND RESEARCH Toward a Dialogic Investigation Amanda Boggan and Shauna Butterwick We can disturb the taken-for-granted notion that poor subjects are constituted of despair and silence and an impossible site for radical knowledge by making room for more detailed testimonies and more resistant ideologies…. [I]nstead of throwing up our hands and concluding that the subaltern cannot speak, cultural critics should allow the possibility that poor subjects have special knowledge and can and do speak as cultural subjects in ways that academic criticism has somehow been overlooking or devaluing. (Rimstead 2001, 4) Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality. But to substitute monologue, slogans, and communiques for dialogue is to attempt to liberate the oppressed with the instruments of domestication. Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them to the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated. (Freire 2000, 63) Dialogue is not something we do or use; it is a relation that we enter into—we can be caught up in it and sometimes carried away by it. Considering dialogue as a kind of relation (with one or more other people) emphasizes the aspects of dialogue that are beyond us, that we discover, that we are changed by…. The creation and maintenance of a dialogical relation with others involve forming emotional bonds, such as respect, trust, and concern; as well as the expression of character traits or virtues, such as patience, the ability to listen, a tolerance

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for disagreement, and so on. (Nicholas Burbules 1993, p. xii) Resistance, at root, must mean more than resistance against war. It is a resistance against all kinds of things that are like war. And there are so many things like that in modern life that make you lose yourself. So perhaps, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly…. I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness. (Nhat Hanh 1978, 122) If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. (Source unknown) It’s not the noise that comes out of the hole in your head that counts, it’s the action you do with your ass that counts. (Amanda Boggan)

INTRODUCTION Rimstead, Freire, Burbules, and Nhat Hanh speak of the need for testimony by poor subjects, of the need for dialogue and relationality, and of spaces of resistance as sites where wholeness can be achieved. Their words and calls for research, which are grounded in a dialogic process, have helped to frame an action-oriented research partnership that we have worked on together, beginning in 1998. We met at a focus group organized by an anti-poverty group working in collaboration with Shauna, who, at the time, was preparing a report for a joint federal provincial committee on effective welfareto-work programs. Missing from the materials that Shauna had been asked to review were the perspectives of single mothers on welfare. Amanda was one of the twelve women at that meeting. She contacted Shauna later and asked if she was interested in getting involved with some anti-poverty activities that Amanda was spearheading in her community. Out of this initial connection grew the idea of an action-oriented research project. Shauna would participate in meetings, bring resources to the group, and document the learning processes taking place. One of the projects undertaken by the group was the development of a fair-trade cooperative venture that would be economically viable and grounded in solidarity with other poor women. To this partnership Shauna brought a desire for her academic research to make a difference, informed by principles of community-based, feminist, action-oriented research where the goal is to democratize policy making and the process of knowledge creation. Shauna hoped this project could help to fill these gaps. Amanda was looking for support, resources, and respect. As an anti-poverty activist, she had too many experiences where charity and the middleclass

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bias of individuals and organizations were the modus operandi. In these encounters, she was often the only poor person in the room. Her ideas were misinterpreted and often dismissed. On a few occasions we presented the results of the research at academic conferences and workshops. These experiences were challenging, rewarding, and disturbing. These encounters illustrated how transgressive it is to have women on low incomes speak of their perspective on welfare reform and what matters to them—often very different from the dominant discourse that makes certain claims about what women need. These moments highlighted for both of us our different locations within a hierarchy of privilege and oppression—oh, what a difference class makes! The asymmetry of these encounters was significant, creating great risk for Amanda. Audiences often saw Amanda as “representing” poor women; she was often the only individual on low income in the room, telling her story, while others, academics and researchers from other agencies, were the audience. Few, if any, in the audience had had experiences where they would be speaking of their lives as middle- and upper-class individuals to a group on low income. Amanda was frequently not heard, her story translated by those present into something that would fit their framework. What follows is a conversation between the two of us, reconstructed from our email exchanges and our memories of certain encounters. By structuring this chapter as a conversation, we hope to create a text that in some ways resembles our commitment to dialogue and the challenges and rewards of creating research that moves toward relationships based on solidarity. THE CONFERENCE PAPER Shauna: Hi Amanda, I’m wondering if you’d be interested in working with me on a proposal and paper for a conference that would happen in March 2001 here at UBC. I’ve started to write a proposal that would outline the paper and presentation we might give. I appreciate how this might not be a priority, given all the things you’re doing right now, but it would be great to start writing something together. I’m happy to do the work on this and for you to participate in whatever way works the best for you. I’ve started to map a proposal for a possible paper. I’m wondering what you think of this idea and what I’ve written. Your feedback is very much welcomed. Here’s the proposal… This paper will outline some of the key lessons learned from an action research project that has been developing since the spring of 1998. The Surrey Collective is a group of low-income women, mostly single mothers living in Surrey (a large suburban area in greater Vancouver, B.C.), who have been building a non-profit organization that they hope will provide some economic benefit as well as educate those who use the services about the lived realities of the women involved and about fair-trade practices. The focus of this paper will be on lessons learned about the provincial policy context within which these women must negotiate their way towards a better future. Examining policy from the perspective of

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those who are marginalized from decision-making processes that directly impact their daily lives contributes to better understanding of assumptions and outcomes of policy. This research project directly challenges several assumptions that inform current welfare reform: that welfare is a disincentive to work and that those on income assistance are not working (and therefore undeserving of certain interventions). The focus of activities has been the development of an Internet-based fair-trade nonprofit organization, working with women’s cooperatives in Central and Latin America. The goal is to sell the goods that the women’s cooperatives produce and to build relations of economic solidarity between poor women living in “the north” and those living in “the south.” This project has proved to be a significant learning experience across several fronts: learning the skills needed to use the technology, learning about the impacts of local and global policy on poor women, learning about fair-trade practices, learning how to use the Internet as a site of antipoverty activism, learning to build a democratic collective, and learning how to create respectful and mutually beneficial relations between poor women and academic researchers. This study also illuminates the significance of hope as a foundation for learning one’s way out of poverty and as a lens through which to examine policy changes and training programs. Amanda: I’m not sure how much learning about realities is taking place in this project. So far all of the people involved have come to the project understanding their own poverty and the barriers that prevent them from overcoming poverty in their individual and daily lives. I’ve found it very difficult to talk with the people in the project about other people’s poverty and the ways that we are all exploited economically in globalization and the current welfare policies. In fact, I’ve encountered hostility in trying to talk about trade issues, economic exploitation, or classism. The rhetoric of globalization does not seem useful in any practical way for poor women. The people in the project have been willing to talk about their own individual struggles in terms of their daily lives. Any other kind of talk is deeply distrusted and seen as threatening and… somehow…an act of domination on my part. This disinterest or distrust is not just directed toward me and my particular way of speaking about these issues; it seems to be also directed toward anyone who can speak about poverty issues in what I would call ideologically elitist terms. I’ve come to think that this project needs to be about economic survival and that the rhetoric is something not useful to the people in the group. This is a bit of a downer for me because I have spent a fair bit of time learning to talk about poverty issues in an eloquent and…what I hope is…an impressive style. The project has only succeeded so far insofar as it has been about economic practicalities and investigating ways that we hope fair trade can serve the poor North and South. And economically the project has failed so far. So I would have to say that the project’s ability to “educate those who use the services about the lived realities of the women involved and about fair-trade” is not entirely true. They simply don’t want this education because these people don’t see it as useful in this project, and anyone who can articulate poverty issues in academically

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educated terms is seen as threatening and domineering and …maybe…exploitive? Who needs it? The fair-trade project has not been successful to date. So far we haven’t been able to get any of the projects with the women in the South off the ground. We’re still hoping and searching for a way to transcend the free-trade market so that it can work for us. We’re in the midst of negotiations, and it’s a very, very slow process of communication that doesn’t offer much hope for being able to do economically viable transactions. The reality with this group in Surrey is that we have limited financial resources. We’re in the process of doing a business plan on this structure, but it’s hard to complete this work because each of us is totally overwhelmed by the current income assistance policies that make daily survival so exhausting and difficult for the group here. There isn’t much time left in a day after securing basic survival necessities. The learning that has gone on, for me, is important but has existed only insofar as it relates to learning more about the barriers governments set up against our economic survival and not necessarily to economically just ways to get out of poverty. We had hoped that fair-trade relationships were a means available for the northern and southern groups to enter the market. We had read that fair-trade relationships were a niche where small producers and marketers can produce and sell goods. But the project is not viable. I wouldn’t even go so far to say that this group has been about learning to build a democratic structure. Although that sounds nice in theory, doesn’t it? What I’ve learned is that there is no way to create a democratic structure in this society as it now exists under globalization. These are hard words for a hard reality. I don’t know if there has ever been democracy for poor people. I don’t have the intelligence or the information to know whether democracy has ever existed within the economic status of the people in the group. I have learned that in each and every moment the group struggles with issues of power and dominance and tries to come to a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the group. This happens within an environment where the poor people in the group have differing personal and economic resources and the economic system outside rhetorically encourages us to compete with one another or with outside forces even as we are pushed together by reality into this group (nonprofit) structure where we hope to gain some economic benefits. In this struggle, there are lots of pitfalls and hard places. It’s an ongoing struggle that never seems to achieve an end in that which can be called “a democratic structure.” Sometimes there is very little democracy operating in the group. Sometimes it takes some unorthodox effort to get to that place where democracy is happening. In terms of voting, I would say that our process has been not one of voting but rather of stomach-churning negotiation. In terms of respectful and mutually beneficial relationships between the group and academic researchers—I think that we’re operating respectfully and mutually beneficially on the level that you’ve been able to provide resources to the group that we thought the project needed and in return we allowed you to study our project. I think that, at this point in your proposal, you’re not speaking about a subject that I can discuss without being dishonest. I either have to be dishonest here or take the other option of disturbing your concepts of democracy. Only by disturbing your concepts can we have a real dialogue; otherwise it will all be pretend. Let’s cut through the bullshit here. This discussion is meant to inform those who have some ability to inform or reform welfare policies. I have no problem in being dishonest and engaging in a discussion that

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implies that talking about welfare policy can result in changes to welfare policy that might benefit the poor. I do that under the following conditions: (1) I expect to be paid to talk about welfare policy, and (2) I want the opportunity to impress a roomful of people who can then give resources to me or our project in return for my participating in a discussion of welfare policy. In each of these scenarios, I am “pretending” that a discussion of welfare policy is going to change welfare policy to be more economically just, and this pretence will take place in return for whatever economic resources could be or have been offered in the past to me or my group as a payment for the pretence. It feels like selling my ass. I also don’t understand what you mean by “hope as a foundation for learning one’s way out of poverty.” I heard once in a movie the line, “Hope is a very dangerous thing.” I think that productive actions against poverty can only come with the courage to be fully aware of our own desperation and suffering in capitalism. I can’t afford to live in “la la land.” I’ve always thought that what Western society lacks is the capacity to grieve. That’s my perspective, I’m aware it may seem like the product of a depressed mind. OUR LOCATIONS The previous email exchange was one that occurred after we had been working together for a couple of years. It relates to a specific moment in the project where we were talking through the possibilities of presenting a paper together at an academic conference. It represents, we think, the character of our conversations where we struggled to be real with each other and also to build our relationship that has since become a friendship that we hope will last for a long time. The reader can likely hear how our bodies and our institutional and geographic locations shape our discourse. We now turn to another exchange we wrote in an attempt to further “come clean” about our intentions, locations, and motivations. Shauna: I speak as someone inside the university, where I attempt to bring a feminist activist orientation to my study of adult-education policy and programs. My ancestry is a mix of Scottish and English [like Amanda’s]. I am middle aged and middle class. I live in East Vancouver. I have never experienced poverty. I have learned so much from this relationship with you, Amanda. This has also been a kind of on-the-job learning process for me as well. We are living in a society where we are becoming increasingly isolated from each other. If it were not for this project, our paths would probably have never crossed. The welfare system and the consumer culture means that our everyday lives are worlds apart. How can we bridge such huge divides? Perhaps through community-based research, where we make a commitment to working in dialogue with others. This project with you, Amanda, and the other women in the Surrey Collective has highlighted the huge distance between the academy and communities on low income that I have tried to bridge by providing resources. The group had a variety of ideas about how I could be helpful to them, and over the last three years I have occupied a number of roles within the group, which has had a dynamic and fluid membership. I have used research funds to purchase computers and Internet access and to provide short-term training to

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help the members use these tools. I have also bought books and supplies and shared with them much of the academic literature I have used in my teaching and research that explores welfare policy reform, participatory action research, and community development. I helped the group make links with various resource people, and have looked for sources of funding for them. I have traveled with them on field trips to visit other poor women’s collectives, and I have sold gift baskets the group made to my academic colleagues to raise funds to support further initiatives of the group. The two of us have made presentations together on two occasions—at a welfare policy workshop and at the conference we mentioned in the previous section. Amanda, you also spoke to my graduate class about using the Internet as a site of anti-poverty and anti-globalization organizing. As someone who has access to funding, who knows the academic territory, I have also been conscious of creating ways for the group to develop its own capacity to conduct research and of being as transparent as possible with my interests and the imperatives I face in the academy in relation to conducting research and publishing. I must admit to some hesitation about suggesting we present together at an academic conference; I don’t want Amanda to be the “token poor person.” When we both went to the alternative-towelfare-policy workshop, your presentation was one of the most powerful. I could see that it had shifted the room and had affected those attending the workshop. But then I watched in dismay as several researchers at the workshop approached you, asking if you would be interested in being interviewed for their research. In a microsecond you moved from being a presenter like everyone else at that meeting, to being an object of research. I am cognizant of the tremendous push within traditional scholarship that will construct you as research subject/object rather than co-investigator. I would like to create some space for stories that explore the meaning of poverty and women learning their way out of poverty from the perspective of the women themselves. Research and accounts written about women’s experiences within formal programs— such as skills training, job search, or entrepreneurship education—sometimes include women’s perpsectives. However, little research and documentation exist about the significant amount of learning that takes place outside of more formalized welfare-towork programs. What this has identified for me is the self-/group-directed learning initiatives that you and others—well, actually, mainly you—have undertaken. You seized the opportunity, once you got on the Internet, to search out an amazing array of information, to attempt to make connections with fair-trade organizations, to learn the rules of import and export business, to link with women’s cooperatives in Central and South America. What strikes me is how the current welfare-to-work process and programs limit your choices and predetermine your needs, rather than supporting your learning process on your own terms. Can this research help to change policy so that it supports your entrepreneurial and self-directed spirit? Working with you has helped me to see how powerful such an approach could be if it were based on principles of adult education where the idea is to recognize individuals as knowledgeable agents, capable of determining their own learning needs, on their own terms. Learning how to learn has been acknowledged as a key aspect of survival in the restructuring of work and the economy, but it seems that current policy undermines this.

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Amanda: I speak as an anti-poverty activist, a single mother with two preschool children, as someone on the receiving end of welfare- and training-policy decisions who has never had a voice at the policy-making table. I live in Surrey, and it’s important to understand how that geographic location is significant to my experiences. There are lots of jokes about Surrey. It’s not exactly considered the most desirable location to live, quite the contrary. It’s a sprawling rural area overshadowed by Wal-Mart and those megastores able to compete with Walmart. The most striking visible landmarks in this area are parking lots and shopping malls. It’s a culture, in my opinion, where people’s social success is often measured by their ability to participate in consumerism, even though they live on the economic margins. The only thing people in my community understand as a way of making political change is to go out and picket and protest against those who are more disadvantaged or to volunteer with privatized agencies such as nonprofits who are contracted to manage people who are even poorer and more oppressed than they are. This is the typical “community activism” where I live. I think it’s important to identify that this is where I live so that people understand we’re not talking about a place where class war or any kind of revolution is even remotely known as a phenomenon or thought about as a viable alternative. Any overt political actions to try to make change here are limited. It’s dead here in terms of any big community “leftist” activity for the simple reason that everyone is working their butts off each day and no one has time. Where we live makes a difference to our politics. Geography matters. Speaking of places making a difference, let’s talk about our joint presentation. As I have told you, I don’t think my participation at the conference made any difference to welfare policy. You asked me what I wanted from this presentation, and I said money. You then said that was unlikely because the researchers and other participants are not in a position to give funding. My second hope was that I could change some participants’ ideas about how research is conducted, particularly research that investigates welfare reform and the experiences of poor women. I want to cut through the bullshit. It’s ironic that, right now, I’ve never been worth so much in my life (as a research “subject”), and I’ve never been so poor. I have been trying for several years, as you are well aware, with limited success to create a cooperative venture that will bring in income. I wanted to get off welfare, but my experiences with what programs are availabe to me, given my life circumstances, were not useful—actually they are destructive. I could have told lots of stories about the barriers I face just to survive and take care of my children. When you are poor in a rich country, the everyday activities that you undertake to take care of yourself and your family become major hassles, and anything effective is criminalized. Such struggles are not visible to those living outside the welfare system. I could tell stories about the barriers constructed because I am poor—stories about social housing, dealing with landlords, getting new eye glasses, finding a preschool for my kids, using public transportation, getting dental and medical care, finding child care, encountering post-secondary educational institutions, buying groceries, and making meals. But why write about the miserable details of my life—it would be just too depressing for me to recount. And why should I reveal these details? Whose life is under surveillance here. Certainly not those who were attending the conference.

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If I were in another location, my efforts to care for myself and my children would be considered as entrepreneurial, evidence of my talents, skills, and knowledge. But I am now a category—single parent on welfare—not a human being. And people, especially those who work or otherwise profit from the welfare system, think they know who I am, because all they see is a category. It seems to me that those who create and implement oppressive policies dehumanize poor people so that they can carry on without guilt. What I wanted to talk about at the conference was not the barriers I have encountered; rather, I wanted to speak about how I have actively engaged in a process of learning that is useful. I have survived many barriers set up by government against my survival. When I went to a local employment program a couple of years ago, I was told to stay home and raise my children. I discovered later that the program was “creaming,” and I was not considered the cream of the crop. I took one course at a time from the Open Learning Agency and completed my undergraduate degree. This was the only access to formal post-secondary education for me. Some time ago, I had to declare bankruptcy after taking several years of university classes, and could not get a student loan. Now I’m studying, by distance education, for a master’s degree in creative writing. I was able to get another student loan; now I’m off welfare, but my poverty remains. I wonder sometimes if I’ll end up an educated poor person instead of just a poor person. What I wanted to talk about was my experience over the past three years of learning my way, on my own terms, not based on someone else’s imposed view of my interests and capacity. Shauna, you call this self-directed learning. What I had hoped to do was work with other single mothers to find a business venture that we could all participate in as a cooperative or collective. I had hopes that this venture would be based on some principles such as fair trade, anti-poverty activism, and a women-centered perspective that honors the everyday and often invisible work that women do. I helped to organize the Surrey Collective, a small group of single mothers with children of various ages all living in Surrey. The group was small, sometimes three people, sometimes more. Some members left and new ones joined. There were conflicts and tensions as we worked toward finding some way of earning an income through a cooperative venture. We were not economically successful. We could not transcend the market. But the learning that I’ve gone through has been invaluable even if it did not facilitate economic justice. My language and approach to my economic reality is much more grounded now in terms of economic survival. I no longer use elitist terms or knowledge associated with antipoverty ideology. How we name ourselves is important. I have no problem saying I am a poor woman, but this characterization was not shared by all members of the collective. I am on social assistance and identify myself as an antipoverty activist. My mother was part of this group since we began, but she is not comfortable with some of my anti-poverty ideology, nor that spoken by others who might consider themselves “progressive.” She worked for twenty-five years for a large department store, and in those twenty-five years she took a total of two weeks sick time. She was laid off after the store closed last year. She participated in a job-search club that she found was somewhat helpful. At least you could use their fax machine and computers to prepare your résumé. It had been a while since she had been out looking for work. A native woman joined the group for a short while; she did not identify herself as poor or low income or native. She had recently obtained a full-time job (where she has hopes of advancement) after taking a welfare-to-work

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training program in computers. I’m not going to say anything more about other members of our group. But I wanted to give you a bit of a sense of my context. I also wanted to emphasize that, even in this small group, we are all quite different. Statistically we are all living below the poverty line, but our views of the world and life experiences are very diverse. We all fit the category of low-income single mothers, but beyond that we are very different. We don’t share an anti-poverty ideology. I was thinking about your concern that I would be the token poor person in the room at the conference. My greatest fear isn’t being looked on by others as “the poor person.” My greatest fear is having to sit through several hours of boring information given in terminology that I don’t quite understand and find completely useless. My other fear is that this particular group, and the work that I’ve tried to do, won’t meet the expectations of the conference participants. The collective members are not leftists or anti-poverty activists in any middle-class-imposed sense of the word. The only thing we have in common is trying to get out of poverty. Even in our collective, I hear derogatory comments about poor people. There is lots of poor bashing by poor people. How can this be? Maybe people on welfare are seen as betraying their own class somehow. This prejudice is often directed toward women with children. There is this belief that, if there were no women and children and men on welfare, we would all be living in prosperity. Somehow the question of who would take care of the children and who would take paid employment never gets addressed. We’re prevented from working together in any leftist capacity as antipoverty activists or as feminists or any other-ists because we’re forced by the government to participate in employment programs that force us to compete with each other for jobs and also for positions in community-based government groups. It’s a constant atmosphere of competition and struggle. The privatization of nonprofit organizations and the co-opting of government funds has created a management culture. The only real point of entry out of welfare is into this privatized arena where, instead of being a welfare recipient, you now get to manage someone else on welfare. Even the activists who claim to be radical set themselves up as social experts. Everyone wants to be a rock star or an academic. I get scared, quite frankly, when I hear expressions like “lifelong learning” or “community based” or “empowerment” or “democracy.” They are slogans, in my experience, that hide a process of exclusion, not democracy and inclusion. Since I was turned away from the employment program, which had zero to offer me anyway even if I had been let in, I’ve become someone who is working outside the system to build structures and resources, which has some potential. The resources that you have given us, Shauna, are helpful, but not in the ways you might first imagine them to be. The experience of having a computer in the home has been a rare opportunity for someone as low income as myself. I’ve learned much about the anti-globalization movement. I’ve read a lot of bullshit. I have learned that working in the system is not useful to poor people. I’ve learned to see the bullshit very well. I can now use that knowledge to survive in ways that are grounded in my real life. I’ve learned weaknesses in ideologies that I would be ignorant of if I didn’t have access to a computer. I’ve gone from being someone who knew very little about the political economy and felt incapable of even typing, to being someone who can critique neoliberal policies as well as the rhetoric of anti-globalization. That’s important, it’s important to my survival to learn what is bullshit and what is not bullshit and how to articulate, not necessarily speak, with

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my mouth, from my perspective. And, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much in terms of economic survival, I can install hardware into a modem and create a java script—all in the space of two years—while also doing the grueling job of raising two infant girls by myself. Much of this learning has been because of my connection with you, Shauna. Our relationship has been that you asked us what we believed or were told we needed and found a way to bring these resources to us. Through access to the Internet, for example, I have learned to critique a load of bullshit; along with my concrete experiences, this has improved my ability to survive in poverty. I’ve got a splitting headache at the moment…. Shauna: I’m glad you think that I have been a support to you, that I have respected your wishes. It’s been a challenging relationship at times when I have been humbled and reminded of my narrow perspective. I remember when I first broached the subject of undertaking some research with other single mothers on welfare. I had an idea that you and another member of the collective might interview other single mothers about their experiences with welfare-to-work programs. You looked at the questions I had developed and very clearly told me that it wouldn’t work. Who would want to talk about their experiences of poverty, what would they gain from it, how could you ask these questions of someone else? It was a painful but powerful moment in our relationship. So much of what you have articulated about how the system doesn’t work mirrors what I have read in the feminist academic literature, but your way of speaking makes it much more real and grounded and powerful. I’ve given you some of these articles. Our conversations about their somewhat abstract ideas and your lived reality have been a wonderful education for me. Some of their ideas you found to be very true and insightful, and others you challenged. Your discussions about the continuous surveillance that you have to live with, the constant filling out of forms, the way you are always under scrutiny, made me think of Carol Pateman’s (1992) work. She looked at the contradiction between the social reality of subordination and the official story of equality and full citizenship in discussions about the social contract. She suggests that we examine the underlying assumptions, especially the idea of consent. Contract theory, she argues, is primarily about social relationships constituted by subordination, not about exchange. The new social contract relationship is structured through time by permanent exchange of obe-dience for protection. The one party to the contract that provides protection has the right to determine how the other party will act to fulfill his or her side of the exchange. I find Pateman’s look at what lies underneath the social contact very useful. It seems to me to offer a clear description of some of your experiences, Amanda. I remember the other day you talked about how tired you are of being grateful, of having to express gratitude, that there is no place, in the system, that is, to express your anger. This form of coercive gratitude seems to me what Pateman is talking about when she explores subordination. You also spoke vividly and clearly about how privatization works. I suggested it was a kind of insidious expansion of the welfare state. You argued that it is not about decentralizing power, it was a way for government to have even more power because they contract out the services where poor women encounter the system. Because of funding cuts and rewards for reducing welfare roles, we have a situation much like

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Yeatman (1998) discussed in her description of contractualist entrepreneurialism. In this situation, each party to the contract—both government and contractor—are not oriented to public values or public-oriented motives. In these arrangements, both parties are oriented to market-oriented action, with competitive dynamics and utility maximization being the focus. Your description of your experiences with these agencies illuminates the negative outcomes of such an approach. In many ways, you are far more connected to the issue of globalization than I am. Your thoughts made me think of Hester Lessard (1997), another scholar who explored the struggle to get social rights in the constitution. She found that these rights are considered secondary to a “natural” market that is larger and beyond democratic control and regulation. Social well-being is to be traded off against economic interests. Lessard, much like you, argues that we need to question the assumption that globalized markets are a “natural” force that is no longer accountable to political communities. We need to question the separation between the economic and social spheres and the primacy accorded the economic sphere. We need to examine the ideology of public and private dichotomy that informs these separations. Another of your insights has been about public and private patriarchy. I think you’d like what Patricia Evans (1997) has to say. She studied the debates in this country [Canada] about income security. She sees the latter as an ideological marker that constructs entitlements to benefits and confers different statuses—claimant, beneficiary, recipient—where the nature of the benefit can constitute either a badge of citizenship or noncitizenship. Social assistance marks a shift from private patriarchy to public patriarchy. For some this is a good shift because women do not have to live in relations of violence. We have a two-track model with women overrepresented in the socialassistance track and men overrepresented in the social-insurance track. Various approaches have been tried to deal with inequalities between men and women, and some countries, such as those in Scandinavia, have attempted to attach value to unpaid work. But no country has done anything significant in terms of sharing unpaid labor, particularly child care. Evans suggests that, given this kind of ideological backdrop to Canada’s welfare state, it is essential to reassert women’s claim to paid employment and to recognize that women’s responsibility for caring for others will not be adequately compensated in the absence of labor-force attachment. She also says that it is essential to recognize that claims to paid employment that do not acknowledge women’s caring responsibilities are claims that will benefit only the most affluent of working women. She concludes that the full exercise of women’s citizenship requires an equitable division of unpaid labor, but this will not likely to be achieved through public policy initiatives. Amanda: I like what Patricia Evans has to say. I think it’s the most important subject. Let me say something about child care, as a single mother on welfare. There is a clear message that this caring work I do is not valued, that it does not count. If I were to participate in a training program or find a low-waged job, I would have to find inadequate child care because the costs of such care are not covered by any assistance I would be eligible for. The messages are completely contradictory. On the one hand, I should stay at home with my children. This is what my employment counselor told me to do. On the other hand, I am told I am a drain on the system and should go out to work, leaving my children with

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someone else. If I did that, I would be told that I am a bad mother, leaving my children in inadequate care. There is much in this situation of poverty that resembles slavery. This is an oppression of the body. It is my body that is enslaved. I cannot escape my condition no matter what physical activities I might engage in to try to escape. I have two options in front of me: to be a slave in the cheap labor pool that is increasing with globalized capitalism, or be a private slave as someone’s wife. How the system treats single mothers with children is appalling; it reveals the exploitation of mothers and children and how our bodies are used to prop up the market. At one time we were talking about what it means to be poor in a rich land, an experience someone described as a mix of “profanity and promises.” It is interesting to consider the meaning of the word “profanity”: “the state or quality of having or indicating contempt, irreverence or disrespect for a divinity or something sacred; not initiated into the inner mysteries or sacred rites” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1979, p. 1167). On a daily basis I experience marginalization and alienation from the mainstream culture, one profoundly shaped by consumerism, a culture that places me in an enormous contradiction. I must participate, but at the same time I cannot participate. I am enslaved, rather than a citizen in the consumer culture. As work that pays a living wage becomes increasingly more difficult to access and as poor bashing is taken up with more vigor by the state and the mainstream media, my very presence, my physical existence, and therefore my body, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be used. It seems that my own power to say what happens to my body is a threat to a rampant and nasty form of individualistic bootstrapism thinly veiled by arguments for a particular kind of work ethic. Even ideas about justice are often intellectual rather than discussions that are in the body. For example, the authors you mentioned have important things to say, but sometimes their words scare me. Listening to these eloquent and learned analyses of the context of my life is far removed from my own struggle to survive in poverty. These scholars place so much value on their words, as though they could speak something holy that will save us all. All this learned crap has been, for the most part for me, a process of depoliticization and inaccessibility to privileged knowledge about the economy. These encounters leave me with a sense of great shame and powerlessness. I sometimes have felt profound embarrassment that comes from powerlessness, although I feel that sense of shame less and less as I learn to cut through the bullshit. I was at a forum some time ago where the goal was to come up with activities that the community organizations that were present could do to reduce what they called “child hunger.” After hearing a panel of speakers, the audience was broken up by some mysterious selection process and we then became a number of small discussion groups. I got stuck in a group with a bunch of non-poor people, listening to a load of talk about ideas far removed from my reality. I heard from the other people in that discussion group that what is needed is to expand lunch programs and various other acts of institutional charity. One woman emphasized that the poor need to be given incentives to work. I said that it would be helpful to expand the ways that we define anti-poverty work so that people could bring their knowledge to the table to share the ways of pracitical survival that may exist outside the system. I don’t know why I thought this was important to say. Maybe I just wanted to embarrass the do-gooders at the forum. Of course the facilitator of the discussion group

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looked at me like I had just insulted her. She responded, “Yes, but we’re looking for insights today.” My point was then dismissed. This forum wasn’t about working with the poor, but governing us. The forum participants were bureaucrats, far removed from poverty for the most part. One person piped up that the problem of hunger for working people, not only for those on welfare, also needs to be addressed. I said that in my experience people on welfare were the working poor, that a dichotomy does not exist. The person who had made the comment then eyed me with a look of resentment rather than appreciation for my knowledge as a poor woman. These small discussion groups then came back together as a coalition to share their lists of insights. None of my words made it to the final collaboration of what had come out of the group discussions. What these non-poor people came up with was a list of acts of charity that they and their organizations could do to reduce what they call “child hunger.” It was clear to me that the particpants were interested only in ideas that could allow their respective organizations to obtain grants. One group advocated giving dented cans of food donated by corporations; another group thought it would be good to get senior citizens to teach the poor how to prepare food. There was the inevitable suggestion that we poor people be taught how to budget. The talk in the room that day was not about poverty—it was about privilege and who got to keep their privileges—the well-groomed, wellfed members of the organizational committee who were following the mandates of their employment and other organizational leaders. They weren’t willing or able to ask why hunger among children exists. I think they were afraid to ask; such dissent might cost them their jobs. Call it classism. A wise woman I know observes that “even though someone might be a moron who hasn’t thought about poverty issues more than five minutes, because they are dressed nicely and have a position they feel qualified to saunter up to the microphone; then whatever useless drivel comes out of their mouths carries far more weight than what we have to say, we who live in poverty.” There was fear that day. And censorship. There was little sense that we’re all in this together. There was little sense that the destruction of our social safety net is a problem we all share. None of those bureaucrats dared to think the poor might have knowledge about survival. The bureaucratic code reigned supreme, and I, as a poor person, was left with no place or adequate language to express what the real barriers might be in reducing my poverty. Now my shameful secret is that what I said to those people in the small discussion group might have given them the illusion that I know lots about the economy. I don’t. I’m no social expert. I only know lots about surviving while being poor. I’m too busy surviving at the poverty level with my children to read and carry around all the statistics and responses to combat myths about poverty. It’s enough to keep me silent. In certain desperate moments I find I have no language. I have also found inspiration in some of the authors. Noam Chomsky, in his video, Manufacturing Consent, said that “as long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival and justice require rational, special planning in the interests of the community of a whole, and by now that means the global community” (1992). Let me close with this quote from the Bible in Proverbs 28:11, which says, “the rich man is wise in his own eyes, but the poor man who has understanding sees through him.”

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BACK TO THE FUTURE We began with a quote from Freire and will close with one as well. We think his work also speaks to the kind of research relationships we would like to endorse, relationships that support and work in solidarity with the oppressed who are already engaging in efforts to transform an unjust reality: To divide the oppressed, an ideology of oppression is indispensable. In contrast, achieving their unity requires a form of cultural action through which they come to know the why and how of their adhesion to reality—it requires a de-ideologizing. Hence, the effort to unify the oppressed does not call for mere ideological “sloganizing.” The latter, by distorting the authentic relation between the Subject and objective reality, also separates the cognitive, the affective, and the active aspects of the total, indivisible personality. The object of dialogical-libertarian action is not to “dislodge” the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to “bind” them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality. (emphasis in original) (1970, 174)

REFERENCES Burbules, N. 1993. Dialogue in teaching—Theory and practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Chomsky, N. 1992. Manufacturing Consent. Video recording, National Film Board of Canada, Montreal. Evans, P. 1997. Divided citizenship? Gender, income security, and the welfare state. In Women and the Canadian welfare state—Challenges and change, edited by P.Evans and G.R.Wekerle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. In The Paulo Freire Reader, edited by Ana Maria Araujo Freire and Donaldo P.Macedo. New York: Continuum. Lessard, H. 1997. Creation stories: Social rights and Canada’s constitution. In Women and the Canadian welfare state—Challenges and change, edited by P.Evans and G.R.Wekerle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nhat Hanh, T. 1978. The raft is not the shore. Boston: Beacon Press. Pateman, C. 1992. The patriarchal welfare state. In Defining women: Social institutions and gender divisions, edited by L.McDowell and R.Pringle. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press. Rimstead, R. 2001. Remnants of nation: On poverty narratives by women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Yeatman, A. 1998. Activism and the policy process. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

2 DESIRE AND BETRAYAL IN COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco INTRODUCTION The overwrought title of this piece mirrors the alchemy of motives shared by social science researchers and “subjects,” motives that are rendered invisible in the research process. Gradually, through our training as researchers and educators, and our subsequent work in various communities, we are becoming more aware of the motives we bring to our endeavor. Often, these motives are grouped under one dubious classification: “biases.” In this chapter, I describe the quality of these motives and recognize two strong elements to our bias: desire and betrayal. Understanding how these motives play out in the field may help us guide our research actions. My initial premise is that, as we engage with research, we inevitably desire someone/a cause/a way of making knowledge public—and we favor it—only to betray another.1 My explication of how we need to acknowledge and explore the ethical value of desire and betrayal rests on examples from community-based research (CBR) where this inevitability is present in the deployment of identity and intimacy. In this chapter, I examine the role of community-based researchers and our unstable situation by using a guiding metaphor of La Malinche. The figure of the enslaved Aztec family who became the conquistador Cortez’s translator and a confidante and is said to have betrayed the trust of her own people by helping him in his invasion of the Aztec world is a metaphor for Gemini-like identities born within the conditions of communitybased research. I provide a description of CBR and its ability to empower or hinder radical research and pedagogical methodologies. Concurrently, the relevance of CBR in any program of ethical transfor-mation in the social sciences and education is underlined. Community-based research is able to offer propitious arrangements to engage in various kinds of popular education work and action/emancipatory research. I sketch how desire, and by extension betrayal, are nomadic and how they ghostwrite2 our CBR projects. Embedded in my explanation is Michel Foucault’s urge to “believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1983, xiii) and, I dare add, promiscuous. In short, our quest for making knowledge public is biased, nomadic, and licentious. Throughout this text, I invoke various examples in CBR because it is in this home where I have cradled my thoughts. In the first case, a mixed-methods research study of quality of life at an AIDS care unit, I describe how community-based researchers are often placed in the curious situation of disclosing their identities, alliances, and insiders’ information, even their queer identity, only to see it downplayed as anecdotal. In contrast, in the second case, a community-based inquiry on the relationship between sexual identification/behavior and homelessness among queer and questioning kids in Vancouver’s inner city—the Pridehouse experience—I detect an odd reversal. By having

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started from a position of full disclosure, our research team faced intimate challenges when trying to apply rigorously some of the conventional tools of research. The subject/researchers rebelled; the methods did not seem to suffice. The third case, about a national community-based HIV/AIDS research project illustrates desire and betrayal in the national arena, probably less harmful to specific individuals but seemingly less productive. In all three cases, some similar questions apply. Does advancing knowledge need to be intimate, perilous, and ambivalent in order to be productive? Or, conversely, do conventional forms of making knowledge public, such as basic science research, take care of the “subjects” by not reciprocating, by looking without ever seeing what is really there? I conclude this exploration by betraying you, my own reader, and not offering answers at all, but an invitation to thrive in the uncertainty, anxiety, and ambivalence3 of research projects that include our biases, love, desire, and betrayal. I suggest that more than mere thematic threads, uncertainty, anxiety, and ambivalence are ethical considerations necessary to make knowledge public. WHAT IS CBR? Community-based research is “a philosophy for inquiry and not a discreet research framework” (Allman et al. 1997, 21);4 it is a river into which the tributaries from feminist, Marxist, queer, and environmentalist thought feed. Action research, participatory research, and emancipatory research—the “decolonizing methodologies” (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999) and “methodologies of the oppressed” (Sandoval 2000)—are often used within this type of research. Most CBR includes a commitment to learn, a form of collaborative popular education—sometimes described as “transfer of knowledge” and “capacity building”—in which all the participants systematically learn about their environment, accrue and examine what can constitute evidence, and re-present it by/for themselves and for others. CBR is tactical and happens, as Michel de Certeau has described it, “in plain view of the enemy”5 and its power/knowledge is, as Foucault noticed, deployed at the “capillary” level. In CBR, one not only learns about method, analysis, and reporting, as Erica Meiners points out (Chapter 9 in this collection), but one also unlearns old ways of conceiving and carrying out research. It is through this tactical pedagogical way that CBR seeps into institutions and their agendas. It often involves tweaking the rules and budget just slightly, remaining ethical and seeing an incremental change happen. In this sense, CBR can be also seen as a “popular technology”; that is to say, a more-or-less discernible set of tools/texts, procedures, and sociality around them (e.g., advisory committee meetings reports, “logic models,” needs assessments, environmental scans, workshops, “train-the-trainers “etc.). It is also an area where political and personal motivations and spheres of influence intersect and nest each other to approach the world inductively or deductively and advance, replicate, corroborate, debunk, or simply indulge (why not?) new and old knowledges. In 2002 I collaborated with the folks of the Manitoba AIDS Cooperative, a consortium of AIDS service organizations and peer-driven projects. I was commissioned to train members of the organization in a few basic research skills. We organized the training activity as a treasure hunt. Four teams of peer volunteers (mostly Aboriginal/First

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Nations)6 and frontline workers followed the instructions in an envelope that contained a task sheet—for example, “Identify a current need or issue and define it as a research question”—and a checklist. Once they had completed the task, they checked whether their response met some necessary criteria—for example, “the research question reliably reflects a need/gap/interest in the community.” If they had met at least three of the main criteria proposed, they could solve a riddle at the bottom of the checklist to find the next envelope, and so on. If they did not meet any of the criteria, the group found ways of justifying their research step or discussed potential ways of amending their research process amongst them and aided by three co-facilitators. In two days, all groups went through all the stages of a “real” research program. The final activity—adapted from political workshops with union members—was to list “next steps” and who would take the responsibility of bringing these ideas forward to the appropriate committees or boards of directors. No research proposal came out of this two-day workshop, but it generated a discussion on roles and boundaries for peer volunteers and the misgivings of some frontline workers. Significantly, our “research work” focused on discussing their current challenges, their perceived lack of direct participation in the organization, and even issues related to the restricted access (what is called “low” or “high threshold” in the current lingo) of volunteers to the buildings supposedly designed to offer ample space and opportunities for gathering and carrying out activities. We had the chance to continue some of this work a year later with one of the participating organizations in the form of a consultation on peer involvement and a forum. What is it, then, research or pedagogy or activism? Hard to say. As I stated earlier, when we engage with CBR, we inevitably favor someone/a cause/a way of making knowledge to betray another. I use “inevitably” to convey the presence of an inherent dialectic between desire (love, motivations that are sometimes at odds with each other) and betrayal (rejection of conventional ways)—not to mean “a destiny.” Community-based research is intimate. My use of “intimacy” echoes Tuhiwai-Smith’s definition of community as an “intimate, human, and self-defined space” (1999, 127) in contrast with “field.”7 Tuhiwai-Smith adds that “[c]ommunity action approaches assume that people know and can reflect on their own lives, have questions and priorities of their own, have skills and sensitivities which can enhance (or undermine) any communitybased projects” (127). Her parenthetical use of “undermine” foreshadows an element of betrayal. In more intimate research settings, things can and should go wrong. Betrayal, as described here, is part and parcel of a project’s “catalytic validity” (Lather 1991, 68)—a project acquires validity for a community once we have been able to survive its vicissitudes and repercussions, as I describe later in the case of the Pridehouse research project in Vancouver, British Columbia. This intimacy of most CBR allows us to chart what Michel Foucault called “the movements of desire” necessary to achieve “austerity,” that is to say, the “ethical transformation of the self” (Foucault 1990, 27–28; see also 91– 93).8 Community-based research is often carried out by cultural workers who inhabit these intimate borderlines between academic institutions (including schools) and communities (including nongovernmental and/or non-profit organizations—NGOs). Sometimes mavericks, some-times groups, the individuals who carry out CBR seldom sit leisurely within a canon. I name us cultural workers because our métier often spills over the institutional boundaries of research to popular pedagogy and activism.9 Also, many of us

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volunteer—a role often overlooked—in projects or programs of investigation. From different vantage points and under conditions not of our own choosing, we engage in CBR.10 BECOMING A RESEARCHER, BECOMING LA MALINCHE Historically, La Malinche is said to have been the enslaved daughter of a noble Aztec family who was given to Hernan Cortez as a gift around 1519. She became Cortez’s translator and a confidante and bore him a child. It is said that, by betraying the trust of her own people, she helped Cortez in his invasion of the Aztec world. My choice of guiding metaphor/character is not to simply accentuate the exotic, it is to reflect and illuminate our long-drawn yearning for what we do not have—the Other—the desire that traverses community-based research and popular education. La Malinche has become “the transfigured symbol of fragmented identity” and “merging cultures” (Franco 1999, 6–7). Distinctively, her virgin/whore ambivalence belongs in el nuevo mundo of the Americas and she is an Other that is really an Us—or better, “a third voice” (Sandoval 2000, 155.5)—infused with mestizaje (e.g., the hybrid Spanglish), romanticism, eroticism, and gender bending (as men betray their compadres by acting out/through femininity),11 and infused with strong postcolonial connotations. Latin American intellectual workers in fields as diverse as political economy and psychology have employed the term Malinchismo to denote not only weakness for what is foreign but also seduction. I expect no grand narrative in Malinchismo; instead I observe a disordering of the missionary narrative positions. It is not longer clear who is on top (el conquistador, el gringo) and who is (at) the bottom (el indio). The ghost of La Malinche embodies the ambivalence that cultural workers bring upon our CBR work. As in La Malinche’s exemplary story, CBR—doing it—involves a retorted ivy of desire and betrayal. In a parallel to the hybrid role of La Malinche, CBR researchers often act as translators/facilitators. They are frequently called on to open research agendas and protocols; to liaise among advisory committees, frontline workers, funders, and policymakers; to interpret and make recommendations on how research outcomes will benefit or hinder a community. As I will show later in this text, this openness to participation, translation, interpretation, and seduction makes for intriguing research arrangements in CBR. DESIRE MADE VISIBLE/EL DESEO A FLOR DE PIEL Desire has been conceptualized in connection with “differential consciousness” “difference,” “third voice” (in Sandoval 2000) and “pleasure,” “erotics “and “true love” by Foucault—call it what you will, it remains a force that, at its most primeval, can be witnessed as exposed appetite. In CBR, the “subject” of research is placed at the center; the research is intended to be driven by its “owners,” and this requires a degree of disclosure. For example, in CBR on HIV/AIDS participants are often—and not always subtly—compelled to disclose their identity and lived experience as homosexuals or ethnic minorities, or worse, as impoverished drug users or sex-trade workers. Can CBR

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researchers actually say, “This is who I am. These are my intentions”? I think the answer is “no.” Hence, how do community-based researchers experience this disclosure of their desire, this differential consciousness, this brutal public exposure? Community-based researchers’ motives are often made visible in ambivalent ways, significantly, in our desire to belong, embody, or at least capture an intimate experience of the Other. Individuals and NGOs, for example, envy the legitimacy and authority of institutional research that often harnesses their funding cycles. University-based academics, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, want to “go native.” And thus, the movements of desire in CBR transform researchers in unexpected ways. In my work, and in my lived experience, I have been particularly interested in the cases in which the native/subject gradually becomes (like) the foreigner/outsider. In my doctoral work I identified a number of key informants I term “organic researchers” after Gramsci’s definition of “organic intellectual,”12 who started as “natives.” Through gradual involvement in HIV/AIDS activism and research, they/we carved out a niche for themselves in institution-based research. Our desire to acquire institutional authority and leverage has charted our trajectories in paradoxical ways: our increased institutional credibility and authority is perceived as a merger with the authority of long-standing historical antagonists—the medic, the epidemiologist, and the university-based researchers. Frontline workers can often be heard criticizing research and researchers for producing nothing tangible, effecting no change. Researchers grumble that frontline service does not improve because frontline workers do not pause to consider evidence of “best practices,” do not follow those pesky “logic models” for programming and evaluation. Frontline workers retort that they do not have the privilege and luxury of sitting and mulling over reports and data…and so on. In any case, organic researchers in AIDS have contributed to a rapprochement between these sectors.13 In the 1990s, Health Canada created a CBR fund within its HIV/AIDS division. More recently, research technical assistants (RTAs) are being hired from among folks well seasoned in community work to support community-based organizations in their work on HIV/AIDS. While organic researchers are invited/elbow their way up institutional ladders, they are also pressured to accommodate the existing patriarchal culture of research in the basic and social sciences. In some cases, the organic researcher is reduced to a token voice from the community. In others, zigzagging between solidarity and betrayal, communitybased researchers/educators are placed in situations where we seem to be working for as well as against the interests and investments of various communities—even our own communities. For example, the inclusion/intrusion of organic researchers (and their CBR agendas) in institutional research—the Malinche, translator and informant—is often perilous because it signals the “crisis of legitimation,” that is to say, a need to revisit research values traditionally upheld as absolute and fundamental. Thus, the traditional perception of science as objective, detached, and clean is projected on researchers and educators. CBR organic researchers—or at least their work—are often perceived as role models of what is “untainted” and “responsible” that merges science, values, emotion, and even faith. However, this turns out to be a double standard when organic researchers are required, implicitly or explicitly, to remain silent and keep invisible the movements of their desire, their “personal” practices, and the ways these influence their engagement with the research process and various communities.14 Often these are the very characteristics that get them their employment in the first place. In the following sections,

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I offer three specific examples of the desire/betrayal dialectic in CBR in an attempt to explain why this ambivalence might be central and necessary to CBR.15 THE CASE STUDIES At the Dr. Peter Centre: The Displacement of Queer In the year 20001 collaborated on a CBR study on issues of engagement in rehabilitation and quality of life at the Dr. Peter Centre, a unique AIDS “day-care” in Canada serving a vulnerable group of HIV-positive persons whose health is in decline (Ibáñez-Carrasco and Kerr 2001).16 I was fresh off my doctoral dissertation and aware that my investigation into the sociology of health science was not a “marketable” knowledge. At the Dr. Peter Centre I was given some latitude to implement the qualitative research component of the research study on quality-of-life issues as long as I administered the surveys for the quantitative section of the research.17 I was invited to do research at the Dr. Peter Centre because of my HIV status as well as my research skills. This worried me because I wanted to escape the typecast of being HIV positive. For a whole year, the research process weighed on me with ambivalence. I often wondered whether to favor my cultural outsider/insider’s insights/intimacy or the scientific analysis/distance. For example, it was, and still is, hard to talk about behavioral patterns of gay men in the third person—not a third voice—in my professional discussions with other colleagues.18 If I “personalize” the analysis, or disclose my sources—sometimes my very own lived experience—I am summarily discounted. I could not (kiss and) tell, “I know gay men use drugs or alcohol for this or other reasons, I am with them in bathhouses, I have had (bareback) sex with them, I have used myself.” In this way, central information is often displaced to the periphery as anecdotal. How can community-based researchers allow identity, lived experience, and scientific theory to coexist in our “professional” practice? If they could, in what ways? Our survey administration became life-history reviews. In addition, we scanned four years’ worth of weekly notes on “community meetings” to obtain narrative evidence of significant issues related to rehabilitation and quality of life for Dr. Peter Centre participants (these are written, compiled, and sometimes illustrated by participants). In addition to interviews with participants and staff, we conducted a series of inventive focus groups with the participants. These focus groups included spatial mapping of everyday trajectories at the center, using the floor plan to link places and motives, “walkabouts” with staff to elicit narratives of rehabilitation embodied in physical spaces, and participant observation.19 Our research collaboration encouraged the participants to own the process and the results of the research. Key members of this community, those in positions of organic leadership, held us accountable to them and facilitated the process with those who were reluctant to participate, which is great support when working with a group of people who have been systematically disenfranchised and neglected. A number of the staff— composed of therapists, nurses, administrative, and operations personnel—were included not only in our data-collection samples but also in our training of grassroots-research techniques.

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It was near the end of our research stint that Thomas Kerr, my co-researcher, and I came to a disagreement that evidenced our “bias.” What I interpreted as a social fact of displacement of gay men by straights20—social inequality—was seen by Thomas as a similar number of opportunities for heterosexuals and homosexuals to engage in rehabilitation at the center, a fact clearly supported by the quantitative data. What was local seemed egalitarian in the context of quantitative data; when placed in a global sociopolitical context, however, a phenomenon of queer displacement from AIDS service organizations seemed visible to me. The survey results and the qualitative data needed to be interpreted within this larger context (often perceived as external to the center’s success). In brief, one could see this element only if one actively looked for it and situated oneself in that perspective. In research, this looks not only biased but downright arbitrary. However, we know that we should “become answerable for what we learn how to see” and that objectivity is “about limited location and situated knowledge.” In my view, the dwindling number of gay men in AIDS service organizations is not only an indication of anti-HIV treatment success, social acceptance, and generalized optimism, but is also evidence of an organizational and social phenomenon of displacement and neglect toward gay men (HIV negative and HIV positive) within a precarious continuum of care and treatment.21 Although our findings described mostly positive impacts on the quality of life of the participants at the center in the form of therapeutic alliances/engagements, it also underlined that such alliances/engagements were often made from positions of traditional disadvantage, in a framework of “addiction/recovery,”22 and in the absence of a “harm reduction” program and policy. This combination made the center a sort of “terminal station” and not a stepping stone to social reinsertion (which might include drug-use maintenance as well as a return to the workforce). Although we cannot credit the findings of the report solely with prompting changes to some of the policies and practices of the Dr. Peter Centre, in 2002 the staff began to implement harm-reduction policies in radical ways. While the City of Vancouver was still discussing (and having a political election controversy) safe injection sites, the Dr. Peter Centre began to implement supervised drug injections, which is still ongoing at the time of this writing. As is often the case in community-based work, meeting the needs of some will always hinder or risk the opportunities of others. A supervised safe-injection site within a center that offers everything from complementary therapies to daily meals services may further discourage gay men’s use of the services and facility, even when a number of those gay men may use illicit drugs.23 My role as scientist in CBR calls for consensus and collaboration, but this democratic practice puts me in an ambivalent role. I relish the contribution that we might have made toward such a radical practice of care at the Dr. Peter Centre, and, at the same time I struggle with the mainstream denial of the displacement and disregard that the medical/scientific community is showing toward gay men. Many of the issues that directly affect gay men (including HIV, depression, and party drugs) take a back seat in relation to the issue of drug addiction. The Malinchismo of focusing the attention and funding on the “new,” “foreign,” and “exotic” issue of drug use is defensible, but it must not obliterate the presence of care and educational work that still needs to be done for three different generations of gay men (HIV long-term survivors, adult HIV-negative gay men, and “queer and questioning” youth). Our

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Malinchismo disregards the community work of an entire generation of GLBT/queers to obtain respectful and appropriate research, education, and health/social services. The disregard extends to the areas of CBR and basic science research: a number of current investigations are dedicated to issues of epidemiology among gay men (youth, raves, and the consumption of party drugs), but it is difficult to fund studies about the sexuality and sociality of gay men.24 In the final report for the Dr. Peter Centre study, I was confident that we had reported responsibly, but I felt that we also contributed to, once again, making invisible the desire of gay men and other GLBT/queer people. Even within CBR, the practices of making knowledge public continue to be entrenched in traditional academic formats and values, and there is little dignified space to voice the movements of desire, such as one’s concerns about the displacement of queers. In the Pridehouse: An Addiction to Drama Some of this disregard of social science research for the sexuality and sociality of GLBT/queers became evident in one collaborative research project on homelessness among queer and questioning youth in the City of Vancouver conducted in the summer of 2002. In this case, this disregard translated into reduced funding, circumspect commitment from sponsoring community-based agencies, and the institutional difficulties the principal investigator encountered to obtain ethical consent to interview homeless minors who often did not have parents, families, and custodians to consent for them but who were willing to share their stories (de Castell and Jenson 2002). In many respects, this was a queer experiment because we dealt with sexuality not only as a variable in the lives of homeless youth aged 14 to 29 but also within the mixed-research group of university and community-based youth. The training of the youth research team in qualitative research methods, implementation, and results was an innovative and democratic attempt at conducting participatory research. The research findings were intriguing and solid and can be found in the existing report.25 The climate of conflict that ensued within the research team was puzzling, however. As senior/adult professional investigators, our desire to participate and research in ways that were meaningful to us and to the young researchers might have played both for and against us. As leaders of the research project, we were not prepared to deal with well-entrenched intergenerational and power dynamics. Our naïve attempt to erase conventional authority roles in a short period in the name of an idealized “common” sexuality/politics, supposedly a common force that would propel us forward, was mediated by traditional behaviors and expectations that needed much more time and effort to be dismantled. In vitro, we tried to dismantle a beast (i.e., patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, class issues, etc.) that is well and alive in our queer communities. In addition, we were able to identify, but not fully manage, an element of “addiction to drama”26 that exists in community-based work, which often involves nonmainstream communities. I find it difficult to explain the desire and inherent drama of doing this kind of research. When one first steps into the field, a as cultural outsider (to the populations and to CBR), one sees grubby individuals who seem to want to stay drowned in hardship and conflict. Now I see individuals in (sometimes ghostly) networks who thrive in spite of hardship and conflict. Even doctors, nurses, and other professionals who work in the turbulent inner cities do not always have a global understanding of the urban ebbs and flows of desire that move the lives of individuals in seemingly negative directions. We

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need an understanding of this “addiction to drama” and other specific, intimate aspects of CBR, much in the same way we are, at present, trying to understand other addictions as social products of an almost behavioral training in how to live constantly under duress.27 Chela Sandoval excavates Foucault’s ideas of ethical self and argues that “[c] itizensubjects have become so surrounded and ‘trapped’ in our own histories of domination, fear, pain, hatred, and hierarchy that the strategic adversary under postmodern times has become our own sense of self” (2000, 163.4).28 Enraptured as we often are in our roles as experts, research subjects, victims, heroes, or celebrities, we develop trust in the authority that underwrites them—almost an act of faith. Often, in this epistemological alignment, we turn a blind eye to the complexity and precariousness of our alliances. Thus, when we act as educators for “Others” as researchers for “Others,”29 when we make knowledge for “Others” we take the risk of making invisible the motives that place us there, entrenched as we are in a limited repertoire of conventional and legitimized roles. It is in this petit treason of the complexity/ambivalence of our moral/erotic investments—a betrayal to others and to oneself—that one becomes a Malinche. In our research team, this addiction to drama played out as protracted disagreements over the value of some of the activities. For example, the implementation of a “Mobile Midnite Picnic,” a NGO van improvised as a late-night food delivery for queer kids in downtown Vancouver, created great controversy as to whether it was useful, charitable, inappropriate, ethical, or efficient (to obtain interviews). There were many opposing and mostly reasonable viewpoints and challenges: it was not possible to target only queer kids without offering food to anyone else who would approach the van, many charities supply food at night, young girls are not at liberty to approach or be approached by researchers because they are often in oppressive relationships with older men or boys who are passing as straight. I felt aggravated by the fact that I had to be out late at night delivering food to poor people—sounds terrible, doesn’t it?—and that I had spent years of energy, health, and money to get a Ph.D. to end up making a meager salary and doing the lackey work. Little did I know that CBR is about doing the less glamorous research activities, the angst-ridden gathering of data, the endless merry-go-round of training workshops, the tedious gathering of literature references for others. In the long summer of 2002, the hierarchy of research and researchers—who is in, who is out, who belongs, who onlyworks-for-whom—harnessed my senses with blinding headlights. Sitting outside the Dufferin Hotel, a seedy downtown bar and an obligatory stopover for queer and questioning young men, I squirmed at my opportunism when getting interviews in exchange for a few bucks so the kids would get a hit, a bathhouse room, or transportation to wherever they would crash that night. My actions, somehow, did not feel too different from the young men’s travail finding derelict sugar-daddies, securing a hit of crystal meth, or dancing for paltry tips. Since then, my standards have not risen, but my lapsed Catholic hangover has subsided somewhat. Many colliding experiences and ideas of this sort existed in the Pridehouse research project. Their ebb and flow imbued the team with anomie, as if we all wanted to sabotage the work, only to shift into a euphoric gear the next minute. We all contributed to these upswings and downturns. The demons one encounters in the community/research field, as it were, must be exorcised in the process. Frequently, there is no time, resources, or energy to do this. Do we, as Foucault suggests, become prisoners of our citizen-subject power, the systems that are our masters and dominators? By playing into the hands of our

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desires to be queer, to an almost “politically correct” degree—a drama of roles and role reversals well entrenched in society—we betrayed our own expectations for one voice to make knowledge public. Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (1989) question poignantly infected the air: “Why doesn’t this feel empowering anymore?” In CBR it is difficult to escape drama, not to take on the labels and identifications of the study’s “population.” We are the border crossers, we go back and forth, and we live in borrowed worlds. The grand narratives of objectivity and detachment make a full circle back into the community-based researcher’s outlook, but only to be understood in a different light. In this sense, in CBR we still struggle with the role of the researcher that goes native and then leaves. This struggle is, in my view, valid but risky. One does not “go native,” one becomes a migrant worker. One’s eventual withdrawal from a research field/community and from the research team where one has participated in the drama of its everyday activities often produces a sense of loss and betrayal. The community-based researcher, often a translator between communities and funders and the mainstream—La Malinche—often winds up as a traitor to a cause. Professional researchers who took part in the Pridehouse project left behind those who belonged to the field—I still see the rent boys we interviewed walking down Seymour Street. I have little left in common with my former co-researchers—and this will always cause resentment to all those involved. How could it be otherwise? Unlike conventional research that promises results to be used by funders or policymakers, CBR, explicitly or implicitly, promises equality and social justice whose benefits lie buried in the future; they are not immediate or tangible. The PASS Study: Reflections on Minor Desire in a “Major League” Research In 2002, I was hired as a coordinator and research assistant for a national communitybased study to test four methods of collecting information about “adverse events”30 to anti-HIV drugs from people living with HIV in Canada. In contrast with my previous job, this research had a large budget, an epidemiologist as principal investigator, several sites and staff across the country, a better salary, and many of the accoutrements that make one perceive a research project as legitimate. Personally, I wondered all throughout the process whether CBR could coexist with large-scale research projects. In CBR, community participation is often restricted to the ghostly presence of an advisory committee (and its “terms of reference”), some sort of Noah’s Arc that contains one of each kind—black, First Nations, queer, woman, and the like—to be “representative.” Little or no mentorship and capacity building are offered, which often results in having “the usual suspects” in a particular field/network sitting at the table instead of mentoring new leaders. In the PASS Study, the desire to enhance the quality of life of people living with HIV “down the road,” manifested presently in complicated and costly ways of retrieving data. Furthermore, one of the original intentions of finding out the positive developments on the lives of HIV-positive people on anti-HIV drugs got thwarted by the biomedical insistence of quantitative research in finding patterns within an adverse event framework—whatever positive we had to report about our lives risked being lost in the numerical shuffle. The central data-collection instrument, a survey, was built primarily to test four reporting mechanisms: 1–800 phone line, fax machine, postage-paid mail, and one-on-one interviewers or focus groups with Aboriginals.31 It included sensitive questions about adverse events when using anti-HIV medications (including

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prophylaxis). The discreet set of statistics derived from the PASS survey will probably be seen as the legitimate result of this research venture. Yet I smuggled in sociological explanations to make those numbers explode, to underline how arbitrary they are in the absence of rich ethnographic data. Sociological explanations open spaces for polemic and controversy; numbers, in contrast, do not seem to lie. The intimacy of advisory committees in specific network research—HIV/AIDSrelated or other—is often ghostwritten in the research reporting. This is done to appease mistrust in institution-based researchers and, worse, in funders and other bureaucrats who often fail to understand the value of the “drama” the intrigue, and the haphazard qualities of CBR. In my view, these arrangements end up looking more like incest than “community-building” and thus, they are silenced and made invisible. Traditional scientific-research interest (e.g., legitimacy by emphasis on objectivity and detachment) prevails over the murky fieldwork elements that tend to be discounted as eccentricities and to remain in the periphery. Tracking “the movements of desire” as a motivating force in largescale research may be daunting. It may seem almost unnecessary—what’s desire got to do with it? However, as I documented in my doctoral work, desire tends to ghostwrite the becoming and coming undone of research. In general, in the face of shrinking budgets for AIDS work in Canada, many community-based organizations embark on large-scale research, probably thinking that this will cement their reputation and secure both legitimacy and further funding. They work in reference to conventional epidemiological research and disregard the explanatory power of intimate kinds of CBR.32 To conclude this case, the large research structure and effort to have a national, representative sample and the grand quantitative effort do not seem commensurate with the modest goal of finding out which reporting mechanism was favored by respondents. Moreover, the scope of the project seemed too ambitious for a national group to undertake as a community-based project. The inherent alliances and rivalries among national and local HIV/AIDS organizations played an unacknowledged role in the research process, and the lack of process evaluation contributed to making invisible the ways in which we made choices for venues, roles, funding, and data collected. My doubts of whether CBR can be undertaken as national research are unresolved. In this and other research projects, I have seen the community-based interests of non-profit organizations—although increasingly in control of the research process and its products—hindered by a faithful adherence and compliance to scientific procedures and analysis that are not culturally appropriate for nonmainstream communities. Our betrayal, in my view, is our repeated inability to reclaim our research goals as primarily community based, not institution based. Community-based research, I suggest, is science at the service of community interests. The desire to implement research that can be perceived as legitimate in the “major leagues” translates into a betrayal of the necessary intimacy of CBR. MANIFESTO: YO SOY LA MALINCHE There is no earth-shattering news here. Drama is/must always be present in social science research and it is more visible in intimate settings such as CBR. Drama remains intensely

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personal, much like the views on research that I have expressed here, and therefore not to be trusted, but also not to be discounted. I am La Malinche, the translator and ethnographer of my own desires, which I only partially reveal if I want to remain employable within this field. However, there is an inherent educational role in doing CBR, and that is unveiling, even if momentarily and in partial ways, the movements of desire that make us meddle in the lives of others under the guise of formal, objective, logical, linear, and disinterested investigation. The challenge is how to account for a series of breaches of ethics to the community without debunking the useful paradigms of science or pedagogy—what would we replace them with? To account for desire and betrayal, we must include in our design, methodologies, and research reporting an account of the movements of desire. This critical self-examination would enhance any scientific-research program and allow for an ethical transformation of the self/community. I call the prejudice in favor of things foreign Malinchismo, and this holds true for anyone interested in engaging in radical methodologies either as researcher or as popular educator. How can one think of oneself as a radical educator without trying to enact the impossible, the surprising, without enacting what I call the “obscene,” that is to say out/under-the-scene. I started this examination of the self/community when I began performing in drag shows for AIDS fund-raising, stripping off the garments to show my lesioned skin, para mostrar el deseo a flor de piel.33 Since then, I have not stopped being a drag queen—ibendito sea el cielo!—and examining the world in dramatic ways, a world filled with peoples and settings and intentions. From dragging my illness out for others to see, to documenting my research on illness, I have plied my trade down many roads. I am La Malinche, in guile and guise, gender bending. I go queering the métier and trade of research and teaching to make it more than mere methodology, theorizing, and instruction, to make it raw body politic. I argue that we teach and research with our bodies, our sensuality, and sociality por delante; it is made visible by our choices and gestures, by our mere physicality in the space we occupy and the voice inflexions we adopt. In CBR, desire and betrayal need to be understood as a “queer” attribute, that is to say, “not normal” possibly a bastard offspring of the crisis of legitimation. Desire’s “little queerness” must not to be confused with “homosexual” although many queers are homosexual and many homosexuals continue to ghostwrite HIV/AIDS CBR in Western countries; virus and volition belong together. I work in social research projects that touch the lives of natives and foreigners alike,34 and my person and personality I cannot disguise…no one’s desire can be closeted and secret. It shows. It moves. As I have sketched in three different scenarios, CBR is often a complicated, awkward, and painful set of street-based technologies. It encapsulates both an alternative and a give-in. It is often downright dangerous to researchers, teachers, and cultural workers, but, I propose, it is a promise of participation and empowerment. Caught up in the rapture of the new and still submerged in the heritage of conventional research memory, cultural workers seem to occupy the role of La Malinche and her deseo errante y proscrito. I write about the Other from my unstable position as “work-for-hire” in social research and university classrooms. Once an immigrant, always an immigrant; the ones without schooling pick berries, lettuce, or grapes in the fields; the more privileged immigrants provide seasonal intellectual work.35

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Desire will always get us troubled/in trouble. Desire is promiscuous; we use our passion for what we do as community identifications, intellectual conceptions, and shifting motives and alliances that tend to complicate research projects. Communitybased researchers—the sophists of our new millennium—have learned to adopt uncertainty, anxiety, and ambivalence, the three ethical approaches to making public knowledge. For me, desire is made invisible because it is printed on skin lesions and scars and abscesses that no ones sees when they see a researcher at their doorstep—the new millennium sophist. Desire and betrayal are often made invisible but they remain in the lines ghostwritten in new research projects, the ways I think about the various research stages, and, most important, the ambivalent ways in which I engage with research. This extends to the curriculum I prepare and inflict on others to build research capacity or simply to explain research results. The data I collect belongs to others, and so do the classrooms where I teach; they are private and commercial spaces. Even desire often belongs to others because it is radical love, it is love that supports and energizes, but also infects and betrays its recipients. It is the love that Octavio Paz defined as “a bet, a wild one, placed on the freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other” (1995, 67). NOTES 1. I am indebted to Suzanne de Castell for her insightful reading of this chapter and for her synthetic phrase “making knowledge public” and/or “making public knowledge”—and all the inherent play of words in this sentence. Although this essay is on community-based research, she made me see that it is more, much more than this; it is about making knowledge. 2. “Ghostwriting” refers to the research work and writing that is subordinate to someone else’s grand narrative; our “commissioned” or third-party—often made invisible—authorial presence is ghostwritten in between the lines. Who we are, our values, motivations, and actions do not see the light of the day as accomplished writing on the page but as “insinuations” that traverse the tone of the writing. 3. These three postmodern maladies are poignantly present in HIV/AIDS research. Two of the cases I present come from the field of CBR in HIV/AIDS in Canada. Although the specificity might not be found in other fields of inquiry in similar fashion, I suggest that the ethical conundrum presented is common to much of the research endeavor. HIV/AIDS research in Canada has offered a fortunate and complicated interdisciplinarity and the merging of research and education. Research and teaching, the very endeavors said to be pursued jointly by academics, are a duality of purpose that is being vigorously debated. (See Pocklington and Tupper 2002.) 4. Useful and applicable definitions of community-based research can be found in Dan Allman and colleagues’ Concepts, Definitions and Models for Community-Based HIV Prevention Research in Canada (1997). 5. In this case, the reversal of the “other”—whoever is around/before us/our work and perceived as a hindrance or antagonistic to it. This tendency to situate other(s) as enemy or antagonist seems inherent to the performative drama and textual ethnopoetics of CBR. Later in this text, I offer examples of this tendency that can at times be crudely described as “an addiction to drama.” 6. “Peer volunteers,” as we eventually agreed to call them in this work in Manitoba, was a name intended to differentiate them from regular volunteers who may not have been people living with HIV/AIDS. The degree and spirit of the involvement in the organizations is of paramount significance here.

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7. It also echoes Oakley’s maxim of “no intimacy without reciprocity” (1981) elucidated by Lather (1991). 8. I suggest that Michel Foucault’s programme of “ethical practice of the self” set up in The Use of Pleasure (l990) can be applied to the social sciences and humanities research. This program calls for a dietetics, a series of self-conscious transformations of mind, body, and soul toward a more ethical (not to be confused with moralistic) engagement with the world— one learns to live with desire and betrayal. 9. Pocklington and Tupper call university professors “knowledge workers who pursue narrow research in a highly structured university” (2002, 34). My phrase attempts to capture an endeavor that spills over these institutional limitations. 10. In Canada, CBR has often been the investigative and pedagogical work of consultants who, in my view, have become a sort of new millennium sophist—an intriguing trend in the sociology of knowledge. Consultants have sprung up due to: (1) the downsizing of organizations that used to house these people as permanent employees with benefits and union dues, (2) the disregard for the humanities and social sciences as “soft sciences” that do not yield hard facts/dollars, (3) the introduction of faster technologies that allow intellectual work to be done from a distance (this includes teaching), and (4) the “deskilling” or compartmentalization of labor into fragments more or less unrecognizable among workers themselves. These elements affect the influence that consultative work (i.e., consultancy, curriculum design, research reports, and recommendations) may have on organizational life and organizational change (i.e., anti-racism, diversity, etc.). Our politically diffused voices probably have a negligible political impact. We go wherever we are called, and we apply our toolkit of skills to any new cause even when we are not wholeheartedly devoted to it. And yet our work is passionate, not without its rewards, and it offers surprising motives, detours, and out/under-the-scene promises. In this chapter I do not explore the flip side of this coin, that is, the growing number of university-based academics who double as “high-end” consultants, supported by their affiliation but not directly linked to a traditional academic quest for unencumbered knowledge—are these supermodel Malinches? 11. La Malinche need also be theorized as a response to the engorged figure of the Macho and his/her heteronormative desire and actions, Machismo. 12. An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1933, ed. David Forgacs (New York: Schocken Books, 1988): 300–3003. 13. Ibáñez-Carrasco, Francisco. Ghost writers: The lived experience of AIDS socials science researchers. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver: Ph.D. thesis, 1999. 14. My doctoral research captured an intriguing movement of desire in which organic researchers, often gay men living with HIV, engage in practices—“barebacking,” drug use, sexual/emotional relations with their subjects, and so forth—that can be seen as counterintuitive and even unethical. In the making of science, illicit alliances between researched and researcher or between leaders/advocates and members of their constituency often take place, but they are the stuff of gossip—alternative roots for illegitimate knowledges—subject to cultural “codes of silence/silencing” or mere salacious research anecdotes. These practices and knowledges are ghostwritten in the formal texts. Historically, this betrayal of oneself and others is embodied in the queer figure of Michel Foucault and his nebulous separation of theory and desire. His alleged nocturnal escapades into SandM in bathhouses and his refusal to directly acknowledge his own physical demise to AIDS are the stuff of urban legend. The ambivalence of Foucault’s alleged actions needs to be kept alive—not all that moves needs to be revealed; the betrayals of those who work directly for communities, particularly for communities of minorities, probably make queer science possible. 15. My polite and discreet writing might betray me. One of the reviewers of an earlier draft of this chapter commented on my apparent tell-all promise and my failure to deliver. No one

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tells it all in research and educational processes/accounts, and these ambivalent boundaries might be necessary to safeguard the integrity of communities and researchers alike. 16. This population can be roughly divided into 60 percent injected drug users—often heterosexuals, mostly males—and 40 percent female, transgendered, and gay men, many of them affected by mental health and drug-use issues. 17. For this I have to thank my dear colleague and friend Thomas Kerr. 18. Paradoxically, my straight peer researchers—often “cool” about gay issues—find peculiar solace in imagining the gay “lifestyle” in nearly flirtatious ways. In passing, one’s personal experience can be titillating or moving (if I am sick) but rarely scientific. 19. These focus groups were influenced by Frigga Haug’s “memory-work” that seeks to respond to some central questions, including, “How did we get to be the way we are today?” and methods described in the “Ethnographer’s Toolkit “(Walnut Creek: Altamira 1999). See complete Dr. Peter Centre report at www.backtolife.ca under “Resources.” 20. These are individuals who self-identify as straight, which is an ambivalence we detected in the data. A number of the interviewees had sexual relations with same-sex individuals to obtain money for drugs, a place to “crash,” or to maintain a “relationship of survival.” 21. In addition, queer researchers notice the lack of education and primary and secondary prevention for all gay men, especially for HIV-positive gay men in Canada. There is a compounding issue of social class misidentification always prevalent among gay men. On this last point, media often does a disservice by exploiting “gay sensibilities” (i.e., camp) to construct an illusion of inclusion in a mainstream “gay class” that is optimistic, hyperhealthy, cute, and affluent. Historically, gay men—particularly when we perceive we have been granted entry into the mainstream of society. In North America, legal struggles are gradually permitting same-sex couples to live as married couples with benefits and tax shelters, adopt children, serve in the military and in schools, etc.—exhibit conservative political and social views. In our zeal to help the next generation, we might have given a clean bill of health and optimism to all gay men (both negative and positive) that, in a circular way, translates into a new form of neglect—albeit a “compassionate neglect” this time around. 22. E.Rapping, The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women’s Lives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 23. The types of drug use (ingestion, inhalation, injection) vary depending on socioeconomic status as much as sexuality (e.g., crystal meth is the drug of choice for many young and adult gay men in Vancouver). 24. These observations are based on my involvement with the Health Canada CBR review committee (1999–2003). An article in the online Science magazine (April 18, 2003) raises red flags regarding this same reluctance to fund “sensitive issues” in the United States. See www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/300/5618/403. 25. For more detail, see the report at www.sfu.ca/pridehouse. 26. I first heard this phrase in connection to the work with street-involved kids from Loree Lawrence, a fellow Pridehouse senior researcher and a long-time community worker in organizations such as KYTES (Kensington Youth Theatre and Employment Skills)— Toronto and AMES (Access to Media Education Society)—Vancouver. 27. In this and other research projects, one can hear stories about petty power struggles between financial workers at welfare offices and their clients, giving them the runaround for a meager check, or the subtle coercion of nurses and detox-center workers who ask people to behave in what they perceive as “decent” or “positive” ways in order to access services. 28. Aesthetically, nowhere else is this more evident than in the didactic, one-track, and literalmindedness of “reality shows.” In community work, the possible mirror image of the “reality show” character is the single-issue activist, particularly if he/she embodies the issue (e.g., disability, illness, trauma, etc.). Yes, I am saying that community work and community workers often lack imagination and diversity, the very principles that we uphold.

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29. The “Other” in this piece has an ambivalent quality, sometimes on top, sometimes submissive. It is elusive and situated. My usage of the word resists our conventional access to its meanings as the “victim” or “oppressed” or “minority.” 30. Unintended noxious occurrences that might not be linked causally to a specific approved medical drug. Adverse events are often a collection of adverse drug reactions that may lead to permanent injury, hospitalization, and sometimes death. 31. The inclusion of focus groups felt like an afterthought. How could a series of onetime focus groups yielding rich qualitative data on Aboriginals and their experience with medical and psychosocial adverse events to anti-HIV drugs be triangulated/compete with the barrage of quantitative data from a national survey? 32. Desire was also made invisible in my ambivalent role as coordinator, consultant researcher, and subject. Through this position, I was privy to the inherent methodological and ethical challenges of the design and implementation. True to my view of desire as dialectic and ambivalent, I silence here many details of the conception and funding of this and other research projects. In the case of PASS Study, I was called as coordinator and research assistant to a second “contract investigator.” We took over the implementation of the project after a yearlong delay and the loss of the first contract investigator. We inherited a research protocol and scenario fraught with challenges not of our own making. 33. The Body Remembers video was edited by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco from footage of AIDS drag performances, 1993–1996. See the accompanying written piece, “Artesanía on High Heels, Art that Heals,” in FRONT Vancouver Arts Magazine, vol., no. 2 (December 1995). 34. In a historical reversal, “my” foreigners are immigrants like myself and “my” natives are the dominant ethnocultural groups in North America starting with Anglo-Canadians and FrenchCanadians. 35. Pocklington and Tupper (2002) present a critique of the current state of Canadian universities, their poor teaching of undergraduates, the status of faculty and sessional lecturers, their lack of relevance in the lives of students and community alike, dissonance between teaching and research, and too-close-for-comfort ties with governments and corporations.

REFERENCES Allman, D., T.Myers, and Rhonda Cockerill. 1997. Concepts, definitions and models for community-based HIV prevention research in Canada. Toronto: HIV Social, Behavioural and Epidemiological Studies Unit, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto Press. de Castell, Suzanne, and Jennifer Jenson. 2002. No place like home: Final research report on the Pridehouse project. Submitted to the Human Resources Development Canada and the PrideCare Society. Photocopied. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. 1989. Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59(August): 297–324. Franco, Jean. 1999. La Malinche: From gift to sexual contract. In Critical passions: Selected essays. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 66–79. Foucault, Michel. 1983. Preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 1990. The use of pleasure: History of sexuality, Vol. 2. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Gramsci, Antonio. 1988. An Antonio Gramsci reader: Selected writings 1916–1933, edited by David Forgacs. New York: Schocken Books.

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Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, ciborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge. Ibáñez-Carrasco, Francisco. 1999. Ghost writers: The lived experience of AIDS socials science researchers. Ph.D. thesis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Ibáñez-Carrasco, Francisco and Thomas Kerr. 2001. Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation—Issues of engagement in rehabilitation among persons with HIV/AIDS who are high risk for declining health. Unpublished manuscript. Canadian working group on HIV and Rehabilitation (CWGHR). Accessed March 31, 2004. [http://www.backtolife.ca/] Lather, Patti. 1991. Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy within the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Messinger Cypess, Sandra. 1991. La Malinche in Mexican literature: From history to myth. Austin: University of Texas Press. Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and eroticism. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Pocklington, Tom, and Allan Tupper. 2002. No place to learn: Why universities aren’t working. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Rapping, E. 1996. The culture of recovery: Making sense of the self-help movement in women’s lives. Boston: Beacon Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed theory. Vol. 18, Out of Bounds Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London and New York: Zed Books.

3 WAADOOKODAADING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE IMMERSION Personal Reflections on the Gut-Wrenching Start-Up Years1 Mary Hermes Near the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in northern Wisconsin, a small group of language activists and education-oriented parents decided to work together to create the first Ojibwe language immersion school. We called it Waadookodaading (the place where we help each other). In a community with very few speakers of the language and no written curriculum, this work is a continual, monumental challenge. In this chapter, I reflect on my internal struggles as I worked with others to start the school. FROM CARLETON COLLEGE BACK TO THE REZ: PERSONAL STRUGGLES WITH CLASS PRIVILEGE Instead of selecting a “do-gooder” or “radical women of color” or “academic activist” cover story (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) (all of which at one time I have selected as methods to tell my story), my strategy is to write about the internal conflicts I have experienced over the past few years in working to start an Ojibwe language school. Perhaps I should call this the “talk show” cover story, or how about the “reality TV” cover story? Most of my struggles have been, quite frankly, about money, class privilege, and internalized racism. I may regret one day having published all these unkind things about myself, but it seems currently the best way to live with these struggles. In this work, more than walking between worlds, I am bumping into walls. As a graduate student of working class origin, I learned to prey on class privilege (smile for tips) and pretend I belonged in affluent environments. It never crossed my mind that I would actually have it or, worse, want it. While holding my first college teaching position (at an Ivy League-like private school), I experienced what it was like to have a title that immediately inspired privilege. Being a professor at Carleton College, in Minnesota, was akin to having co-starred with an Oscar-winning actor. Astounding. Instant stardom. Where do you teach? I would drop the name like a bombshell. Assumptions flying, I let them. I enjoyed it. After four years of immersion into faculty life at an elite private liberal arts college, I too believed that I was among the educated elite. I thought that I must be the best of the best, as I was clearly fit to serve the ruling class. Although I was critical of class privilege while I benefited from it, I quickly found how much I missed it after moving back to the reservation community. When I previously lived on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, I

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had been jobless and happy. I had babies and welfare, what more did I need? I am not sure what happened to me at that elite college, but it was difficult to come back to the reservation community where I taught at the tribal school and to move back to the deeply racialized small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. I became just another brown face to be watched at the Ben Franklins store. I was probably in the library because it was warm. Brushed off and invisible, I began to use my title (“Dr. Hermes”) and dress up in public. Taking Ojibwe language classes at the community college was another blow to my crippled ego. Sitting side by side with my former high school students, I struggled where they shined. They shouted out answers faster than I could comprehend the questions, and I cast around for some form of oppression to blame. (Sexist boys, I thought to myself….) They had never even heard of Carleton College! Although this is humorous to reflect on now, at the time I felt my world slipping away. My intellectual prowess was not really all that. Other people were smart, too, plenty smarter than I was, and they weren’t called “Doctor.” These experiences vividly illustrated to me that the Ojibwe language had a great capacity to level us. It surely leveled me. I hoped, too, that it would level the playing field for our students. Many of my colleagues at Carleton College were genuinely confused about my decision to leave. During that difficult first year back on the reservation, I myself was confused about why I left. Why did I casually walk away from nearly a quarter-of-amillion-dollar benefit in child college tuition? (A generous benefit of the college is that children of full-time faculty may attend free.) This bothered me because now I was teaching at a state school to which I would not be able to afford to send my children. In theory, I knew that moving back to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation was the right move. I just had not counted on missing a status I was barely aware that I had. GETTING STARTED Before moving back to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, near Hayward, Wisconsin, I began a conversation with a friend and language activist who resided in the reservation area. In the spring of 2000, we decided to act on a dream: we would build a school. This would appear to be an ordinary school (to the funders, the myriad boards, and the frightened parents we encountered) but in truth it would be a radical intervention in a community divided by race for the past 300 years. We would meet all the standards, follow all the rules, test all the kids—only we would do it all in the Ojibwe language.2 Three years later, we have two of the original six students we started with at the Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion School. These two understand Ojibwe, but they speak it only when prompted. I am still learning the Ojibwe language, and it is much harder than I thought it would be. Everything is so much harder than I thought it would be. We still have our dream, but it is tempered by reality. We also have a passion for this work. It is intellectually demanding, organizationally complicated, and emotionally draining. We are decidedly at the very beginning of a movement that may take every bit of the next twenty years to make a difference. We also acknowledge that we could be at the beginning of the end. One school alone cannot revitalize a language. Individuals, families, and communities must make the decision, as we did, to work to make the dream a reality.

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For me, after years of wanting to put my intellectual and emotional energy into a form that suited my life, politics, and identity, I have found this work. This is not a “cause” I will get tired of and move on from. I am a mixed heritage Native woman, married into this Ojibwe nation, not born in to it. Learning an endangered indigenous language takes years of commitment. It demands a shift in mindset and lifestyle. It demands commitment (Hinton and Hale 2001). In this way, this work has changed me and continues to shape my daily life as well as my career. It takes patience and demands perfection. I am continually humbled to be a student of the Ojibwe language. I am profoundly saddened that I may be one of only a handful in my generation to glimpse the beauty and power that lie within this language. I am less frustrated than I used to be at the deep wound that colonialism has left on our people. We are dysfunc-tional; we are fragmented; we are strong and fragile. The collective dys-functions within my community frustrate me less and diminish in the face of the larger goal and the work of language acquisition that is continually at hand. No matter what kind of idiotic things we do to each other, the language pulls us on. Regardless of how much passion that I and the others involved in this work possess, I know that we could fail. And if the school fails—a real possibility—I may have to move on, or start over, or radically readjust my strategy. It is an odd and a new contradiction for me, to have to work my ass off for something that I am not sure will survive. For me, it is very scary to be sure of the direction and equally sure of the constant uncertainty of this work. Through this work I have honed my tolerance for ambiguity and practiced a daily, consistent effort to acquire the language in the face of unfavorable odds. Ambiguity and work inform my daily context, and this is what we ask of our students. My daughter is seven and occasionally reminds me, “We have to, Mom, to save our language.” I don’t believe at age seven I cared to know anything beyond knowledge of the time my favorite TV shows came on. When my daughter is forty, will she be one of a community of speakers, or if she will be a dinosaur with no one to speak to? The school curriculum is an odd mixture of student-centered constructivism and teacher-centered language immersion. We try to meet national standards in all subjects— but first we have to work twice as hard to ensure students understand what is being said. We teach math, language arts, science, physical education, and art in the Ojibwe language. The students have one hour a day of English, in English. In addition to this structured curriculum, we add field trips every other week and as much outdoor, handson environmental curriculum as we can. I have observed that these outdoor and “nontraditional” learning experiences and contexts, often more relaxed in terms of content, may actually be a prime time for language acquisition. This project forced me to examine privilege and the apparent contradictions that are the mark of a community that has survived many years of systemic colonization. Contradictions abound in the communities I work in as well as in my own life. For example, I am trying to attain tenure but using all of my pretenure writing time to learn the Ojibwe language. I want the best for my children but we moved them from a private school and community where the mean family income is upward of $100,000 to a public school where 85 percent of the children qualify for free and reduced lunch. Then there is the contradiction of using a public school—the very same means that destroyed the language in the first place—to revitalize the Ojibwe language (Adams 1988; Barker 1997). This is an internal contradiction that drives so many people in this community to seek

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English as the way out of poverty, while the riches of our own language disappear from the planet. And why is it that some of our very finest learners, speakers, and scholars of Ojibwe have criminal records that prohibit them from ever standing in front of a class? Self-medication is a popular means of survival, but there is cost. The contradictions we live through leave scars that are deep and telling. I am getting used to them; I no longer see them only as ugly. IDENTITY WARS AND OJIBWE LANGUAGE The Ojibwe are one of the most populous tribes in the United States, but they were divided into separate, politically independent nations during colonization.3 More than sixteen Ojibwe reservations exist in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota. Each has its own independent, sovereign tribal government. These boundaries make working together on language issues difficult. The status of the Ojibwe language for each reservation area varies. Many have only a handful of speakers; some have none. In Minnesota, some communities still have 50 to 100 speakers. In addition, about two-thirds of the tribal population live off the reservation. Statistics suggest that there are about 60,000 speakers of Ojibwe in the United States and Canada (Truer 2001). Communities that are located farther away from the reach of American mass media have generally survived much better, and it is those “fly in” communities in Canada where Ojibwe still thrives. In 1990, according to U.S. Census data, there were an estimated 4,000 speakers of Ojibwe in the United States. Today in my community of about 2,500 we cannot find more than fifteen speakers within a 100-mile radius. Most of these are over the age of 65. Within the next ten or fifteen years, we will see most of those speakers die. In the community where I reside, Lac Courte Orielles, less than 1 percent of the population speaks Ojibwe. In three of the closest Ojibwe communities to Lac Courte Oreilles (Red Cliff, Lac du Flambeau, and Fon du Lac), very few, if any, first speakers of Ojibwe can be found. For most reservation communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota it is the same: only a handful of fluent speakers remain, all rapidly aging. This reality means, in Minnesota and Wisconsin where there is a large Ojibwe presence, that Ojibwe presence will be greatly diminished by the loss of a living language. Some Elders say that, when we cease to speak the language, we cease to be Anishinaabe; instead, we become descendants of the Anishinaabe (Truer 2001). One of the results of the attempted cultural genocide is that those who survive search for ways to put the pieces of their identity or culture back together. Some get carried away trying to do it the “right way” (as if there ever was one right way). Tom Peacock (2002) calls them “culture cops”—anybody who knows a little about native culture can try it out, and suddenly a bit of knowledge becomes power, and power becomes something to wield and hoard. This dangerous way of thinking is exactly what breeds “culture cops.” In a culture that has been fragmented and oppressed through colonization, it is a difficult task to revitalize communities and cultures and put all the pieces back together. At the same time we (Native people) are also subject to American popular cultures’ stereotypes and appropriations of Native traditions. We pass this legacy of internalized oppression on to our children. Teaching and learning the language demands every ounce of our attention, and language acquisition has

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become the strongest antidote I know of to fight internalized oppression. Fighting among ourselves is the biggest distraction to overcome—and yet, when we engage in the Ojibwe language, everything else falls away. Students want to scrap over who gets to hand out the papers, who gets called on the most, who gets to sit in front…and we continue to pull their attention back to the focus, the language. We ask something very big from people so small, and I believe the students in our school are the true heroes in this struggle. In and through the Ojibwe language we tell stories; multiple paths are somehow easier for me to see, knowing that our first level of expression of thought—language—is already congruent with the past. My link to 10,000 years of human existence is a grounding force. I suppose we have “language cops” also, people who think they are “more Ojibwe-than-thou” because they know the language and you don’t. But I would like to believe that a language, especially an endangered one, is not something you can hoard and save. The only and the best thing that can be done to keep the language alive is to share it, often, consistently and with an open heart. Language, unlike cultural traditions, cannot easily be essentialized. The work I have done in multicultural education, anti-racism, and reversing oppression has led me to this moment: revitalize the Ojibwe language. I used to think that this language was so obscure, so difficult, and so far gone—what was the point? But something 10,000 years old deserves at least five or ten years of my effort I can’t and don’t want to convince anyone to join us. This internal decision is very deep and personal. The best use of my energy is to learn, that effort will speak for itself. MY RESEARCH Since 1993 I have studied the shape of Native culture-based schools, specifically Ojibwe culture-based schools. Tribal schools adopted the culture-based strategy from a groundswell of civil rights activism in the 1960s. In the 1970s, self-determination was the official policy of the US government toward Native people. Schools for Native Americans, formerly run by the federal government, were contracted out for tribes to run. These schools, known as “tribal schools,” began to experiment with adding “cultural knowledge” to the curriculum. In Wisconsin and Minnesota the public school curriculum was the model, and Native cultural content was added to the state curriculum. Without addressing the deep-seated racism inherent in institutional structures, the culture-based movement has been limited (Hermes 1995). Ojibwe culture was, and currently is in this area, taught in and through English. The result is the establishment in schools of two, often competing, academic streams: one cultural and one academic. Students can read this as a choice: academic success means assimilating, and culture-based success means being Indian. Students can choose: being smart or being Indian. If there is a “research” consensus that culture-based schooling holds the key to our academic success and to cultural competence, why are we not producing either? Where are the scholars? Where are the tribal historians? Why hasn’t the high school dropout rate decreased and the college enrollment rate soared? Why do students sit through twelve years of Ojibwe language culture classes and come out not able to speak a full sentence? Four out of ten Native American students in North America will drop out before high school graduation. In Wisconsin, by eighth grade, Native Americans are behind white

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students by 30 percentage points on both math and reading proficiency tests (this figure adjusts for socioeconomic status). Teaching “culture” through the medium of English and within the American educational structure, can and does radically alter the intent and the effect of teaching that curriculum of “culture.” The intent of the culture-based movement in Native America was varied: to connect students to their past and help them think through the future, to raise consciousness and in turn to raise self-esteem, to make school meaningful and to revitalize traditions that had been smashed into small bits, and to create islands of understanding amid a sea of chaos. In short, “culture” was meant as a power tool. Given this tool, American Indian students would be able to negotiate their place within the world, adding a unique and much needed perspective. A tool, like language, lends itself to both structure and creativity. What we give to students must be the same: concrete and tangible enough to teach yet fluid enough to carry an individual’s own creativity and identity. What is problematic about the turn toward culture-based curriculum? The general concept of culture is abstract and does not lend itself to classroom teaching. It is everything and nothing. When defined as subsistence practices or artistic traditions, “culture-based” skills can be taught, such as animals hunted and baskets made. These might be cultural acts, but the power part is less clear to me. These are specifics acts from a specific context; they are pieces of culture that can represent the culture but that do not generate the culture. I believe that language is the power tool. Using it, we can be anywhere and do anything and still be a vital link in the Ojibwe nation. START-UP: FRIENDLY CONVERSATION TURNS INTO SERIOUS OBSESSION I remember driving over to visit Emma and Jaaj in Wisconsin with William. Emma and Jaaj are the Ojibwe language activists in my community who realized the best strategy to save the language would be to start an immersion school. If anyone is to be credited with this unique idea, they should receive the accolades. William is a fluent Elder and medicine person who had been staying with my family. He is a strong supporter and teacher of the Ojibwe language. We sat across from an eagle’s nest, watching the young being fed, and thought about just starting. It was spring; we could find a few interested families and pull together a pilot kindergarten in the fall. Not knowing what we were doing, and so not intimidated by the unknown, we decided to feed our young the Ojibwe language. During that pilot year, Emma and Jaaj taught with three Elders in a borrowed conference room in the tribal school. In the meantime, I was at home using my Ph.D. to legitimate our plan and to start moving the paperwork through appropriate channels to get a charter and funding. In Wisconsin, a school board can agree to sponsor a charter school by a majority vote. This does not guarantee funding, but the charter model provides opportunities for groups to pilot small-scale educational reforms and shape and develop public schools. Because charter schools were designed to be incubators for innovation, we easily met the criteria and addressed a deep need of the district: failing Native students.

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The paperwork was easy (comparatively). All the initial planning and development was in our heads and on paper—just like so much of academia—but with a real application fast approaching. We were fired up. We met at Chinese restaurants and planned. We had meetings where nobody showed up but us, and we planned. We wondered if anybody would sign up their children to be in the school, and we kept planning. Emma and Jaaj knew from their language work that there were so few speakers, something radical had to be done. I knew from my work in education that charter schools were meant for groups like ours. We designed a K–8 school, thinking we would grow one grade at a time and have small numbers for a while. Our mission of Waadookdoading is as follows: To create fluent speakers of the Ojibwe language who are able to meet the challenges of our rapidly changing world. The school will be a community center for language revitalization, local environmental understanding, and intergenerational relationships. We expect that students will be grounded in local language, culture, and traditions, while aware of global concerns. Our aim is to foster a love of learning while teaching the skills that will enable students to create solutions for our community and our planet. This school is a place to design curriculum from the ground up that not only is in the Ojibwe language but also comes from an Ojibwe worldview. Although it will take years of research in order to accomplish this, everyday we take steps in this direction. When we went to the school board in Hayward the following spring (2000) to ask for a charter, the groundwork was there. It was while preparing for this meeting that I noticed how deep and lasting the scars of racism are. Many Native people in this community have lived their whole life with the public school that is next to this town. They cautioned us and said we would never get a charter. I felt cocky with my doctoral degree and my experience teaching at an elite college. I thought I could convince the “suits.” And we did. Our team had not only some legitimacy and status, but also a potential solution for a real and pressing problem. The academic achievement of Native students is way behind white students by the eighth grade in Hayward, in Wisconsin, and in the United States. Three out of ten never even graduate from high school (www.dpi.wi.us/dpi and the Hayward School District). Even after socioeconomic status is accounted for, race predicts failure. This systemic racism is a failure that no one seems to know what to do about, and it is well hidden from the general consciousness of the public. How could they refuse us? They did not. YEAR ONE: DISORGANIZED AND NEVER SURE OF SURVIVAL The dynamics of the school in the first year were akin to a roller coaster ride. I often wanted to throw up. At times, we were soaring because we saw our ideas become reality. At other times, we were sick with the sheer enormity of the task ahead. My greatest comfort was to remind myself that we were contradicting—in fact reversing—150 years of language oppression. This work was and is an act of healing. We started a school to

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save the Ojibwe language within the very same place it was so violently damaged— public schools. We had to figure there would be some pains in this work. What kind of school curriculum can be “healing”? I grew to understand that anything that empowers, restores, or otherwise highly engages students could be considered artistic or even healing. As the curriculum we develop addresses a wound in the community, in families, and in individuals—a wound caused by schools in the first place—it is both appropriate and necessary to consider healing to be a part of the educational work the school does (hooks 2003). Relations between whites and Natives also continue to be a challenge that the school addresses. In a small town that has always been divided by race, all community members are too accustomed to drawing the lines between us and them (Native and white). The Native activists, myself included, are barely able to recognize “outsider” help when offered. Our school is chartered by the Hayward Community Schools (we have a contract through the Hayward School to operate), and the public school board (composed of mainly white citizens) is cognizant of the fact that public schools dismally fail Native kids. The failure rates and dropout rate are systemic, and local schools have been segregated by race since the Hayward School opened approximately 100 years ago. The school board gives us a building, transportation, fiscal services, counseling, and special assistance. There is no doubt in my mind that they help us. They have given us everything they can “afford” (stopping short of money) and a green light. “Go ahead! Maybe you can solve the Indian problem.” Perhaps the board recognizes that the failure of the local public schools to meet even adequately the educational needs of Native kids is not really an “Indian problem” at all. And yet the day-to-day interactions with individuals—white public school teachers committed to teaching young Ojibwe children in and through English—can be at odds with the mission of our school. People on both sides (Hayward Public and Waadookodaading Charter) are friendly, for the most part. The frequent “little misunderstandings “how-ever, are unwelcome reminders of the old and deep pain we all harbor. Nonchalant comments, jokes about “low man on the totem pole” or insensitive remarks about “all the Ojibwe kids who come to school without warm hats and mittens” are difficult to reconcile with the awareness we carry. We started with a staff of two veteran teachers and one language radical who was fairly new to teaching kids. I am the person who lives here but works for the university, and my power and position are at times a bit ambiguous to the others I work with at the school. I embody the establishment of Western education—the university—and yet this does not necessarily afford me power or prestige in Ojibwe society. Can academics ever be trusted on the reservation? The veteran teachers did not come back the second year; it was too hard on them. The daily cost of wondering if the school would continue was hard on all involved. We did not have an administration. We did not know how long it would take teachers or students to get their language skills to a high level of proficiency. We did not have a curriculum or resources in Ojibwe…it was all difficult. I am forever grateful to our first-year veteran teachers for getting us through that first difficult year. They are both grandmothers and have jobs at the community college this year. They help us from there, and they don’t need to be on the front lines. Everyone has a place in this struggle, but sometimes finding the place is difficult.

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YEAR TWO: FLYING, FALLING, AND FINDING MY PLACE IN THE STRUGGLE By the fall of 2003, we were flying. We got another young teacher from Canada who is proficient in the language, and a certified teacher. We hired a full-time director. All of these Ojibwe men are clean, sober, and passionate about this work. We were united in mission and had refined our strategy. We got a grant that gives us three years to live. We can inhabit the same classrooms within the public school for two years in a row. We made huge gains. Then the predictable chaos comes back, and I wrote this in my personal journal: Today I am Ready to Quit Jan. 8, 2003 Got mad teaching math today. Mad at how little math Sam knows, how little he can listen…mad at his mother who brings him in late. Mad because he stays up until 10:00 p.m. and no wonder he can’t listen to hexagons. Mad at the White men who stole, raped, looted and now leave in poverty and dysfunction generations of Indigenous people. Leave us to kill ourselves, to kill each other with our tremendous anger. Today I feel like quitting the school. I hear an Ojibwe word and it is so far out of my consciousness it sounds foreign, how will I ever, or will I ever learn? It is not the kind of thing you can put on a to-do list. The students are struggling to learn and we are struggling to teach. Does it have to be this hard? Chaos is unpredictable but predictably touches our lives on a regular basis. It is disheartening. Roger’s family is falling apart, and he has to quit the school. Doreen has had another violent death in her small circle. How can she take it? This is the third one in less than a year. Last year it was Dorothy’s family. This is the face of all those ugly statistics. Native people live harder and die sooner. Our teachers are two of only a small handful of teachers who are also highly proficient in Ojibwe, and the university is courting them. How hard is it to make the Ivory Tower look better than the rez? We have two great teachers; if we lose one, that is half our teaching staff. I want to get on my moral high horse and say “don’t go! You can’t go! You have a responsibility to stay!” But I will immediately get bucked off that high horse, because part of me wants to jump ship too. This is too damned hard. I have been in those places, jobs, Ivory Towers. Where life is not quite so full of chaos. In those places, we would get mad at each other for being on the wrong side of an intellectual argument, we politely and passionately debate our ideas, but when the time is up we retreat to the coffee shop or a good book or a walk in the arboretum. Then I thought stress was being ill-prepared for an 8:00 a.m. class. I know for a fact that those places are somehow qualitatively easier to inhabit. This place breaks my heart daily and I fondly remember the Ivory Tower where people had the luxury of growing cynical and then going out for coffee.

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Sometimes I like to pretend we are our own peaceful island. All of our staff are clean and sober, college educated, and pretty level headed. We have tried very consciously to keep tribal politics, family feuds, and internalized dysfunction out of our organization. But we are all Anishinaabe, in one way or another, we have lived this. In one place or any other, our lives have been touched by what is the continuation of systemic oppression. We have learned to get used to chaos—even expect it. We have learned to survive. Yet why should I sacrifice personal opportunities for me and for my family? I have thought many times while running in the woods that this struggle is inherently worth it, to me. So clear is the mission, the strategy and my ability to be a part of this movement I will continue as long as I can. Last year I had this feeling of wanting to run away every other week. I even checked out jobs in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I dreamed of the Big City, with big pay and individual anonymity. I dreamed of jobs that paid well and where I would not have to know anyone’s last name, or maybe not even their first name. I dreamed of cities where tragedy was only at the theaters and food comes packaged at the grocery store. My mind and heart would have enough free space that I could enjoy reading a glossy magazine. At times, this romantic notion of “city” pulled me. This year, I have had the desire to quit only once in six months. We must be growing. Dare I say it, stabilizing? It is ironic that in this struggle for great change, my deepest yearning is for stability. I think the biggest struggle in this work is internal to the Ojibwe community. If we continue our habit of fighting, we will not survive all the hard work ahead. If we can find a way not to devour ourselves, not to implode over the individual struggle for power and ego…. If we can remember how small we are in the big picture, and how big our efforts in the small picture, then we will survive. Personally, I am content to contend with these internal struggles. My ability to move between the worlds of the university and the Ojibwe community serves me well. Like the sense of a traveler who has some imaginary distance to reflect on places visited—the two positions of university professor and language activist help me to appreciate and find balance in each context. I don’t take committee meetings at the university too seriously, and when I find my undies in a knot about something at the school, I drive 100 miles north to the university where my colleagues offer genuine support and interest. I find outsider allies and outside support extremely helpful. My university work affords me useful perspectives on my activist work. I visit student teachers all over the district and gain a bird’s-eye view of what other “good” schools are doing. This helps with the isolation. Our school is unique, but we are not oblivious. It is quite a privilege to peek into a variety of classrooms and then leave. When I speak to my white undergraduate students from the cities about Native Americans, at first they are defensive, but they recognize the efforts of a woman in pain and they want to listen. Again, there is a reflective distance that is created as I try to explain to them the complex and urgent situation we are in. Usually, they all have some dim awareness of Native Americans, but they are good listeners. Their listening is helpful, too.

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Someday, Waadookodaading will be in a place where they could withstand a little research. Someday, I hope to enjoy that kind of distance as well. My desire to join in this work was born out of the knowledge I gained while researching Native culture-based schools. The opportunity to act on that knowledge, coupled with my desire to produce research that possesses the ability to change the world, has led me to see how easily activism and research can be linked. I think the freedom afforded intellectuals in this culture could often be used to fuel projects for social justice. Why doesn’t it happen more often? I wonder, is action the cost of that freedom? Ask me if and when I get tenure. EPILOGUE In May 2003 I got a call to go to Washington, D.C., to testify in front of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs for the Native American Languages Act Amendments. The Hawaiians called and asked if I could speak to the need to certify Native language immersion teachers. I was greatly honored and agreed to go. I was lifted up by the work of the Hawaiians, the Blackfeet, and the Anishinabekwe—Emma, Sara, and Noodin— who accompanied me. I was awed by the humility and empathy from Senator Daniel Inouye and the staff of the Committee on Indian Affairs. Now there is no doubt in my mind that we are at the forefront of a movement. We may get federal support, in the form of a law. We will move forward, regardless. This struggle is only beginning, and it is already 500 years old. NOTES 1. Thanks to my friend and colleague Pila Wilson of Kulanui O Hawai’I Ma Hilo for the title of this chapter. During the 2003 testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Pila described the first five years of starting an indigenous immersion school as “gut wrenching “especially for those first immersion families. His description aptly describes my experience. Names and events in this chapter have been altered to protect the anonymity of individuals. In order to protect confidentially, I have changed the names of people and altered descriptions of events related to the school. 2. The terms Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, and Chippewea all refer to the indigenous people of North America who are currently located around the Great Lakes. The terms are used interchangeably. I will use Anishinabe or Ojibwe to refer to both the tribal nation and the language they speak. 3. For general information on the Ojibwe nation see Peacock (2002).

REFERENCES Adams, David Wallace. 1988. Fundamental considerations: The deep meaning of Native American schooling: 1880–1900. Harvard Educational Review 58 (February): 1–28. Barker, Debra. 1997. Kill the Indian, save the child: Cultural genocide and the boarding school. In American Indian studies: An interdisciplinary approach to contemporary issues, edited by D.Morrison. New York: Peter Lang, 47–68. Connelly, Michael and Clandinin, Jean. 1990. Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher (June-July); 2–14

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Hermes, Mary. 1995. Ojibwe culture based curriculum at a Native American tribal school. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Hinton, Leanne, and Kenneth Hale. 2001. The green book of language revitalization in practice. San Diego: Academic Press. hooks, bell. 2003. Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. Peacock, Thomas. 2002. Ojibwe Waasa Inaabidaa: We look in all directions. Afton, Minn.: Afton Historical Society Press. Truer, Anthony. 2001. Living our language. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.

4 TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE Adriana E.Espinoza Over the past several decades, Latin and South American countries have experienced violent political transitions from military to democratic governments. Many of the “new” governments—in the name of reconciliation—appear to have made efforts to forget their historical past: state-sanctioned torture, violence, and murder. The executors of the crimes of previous regimes are often protected by active concealment that requires collusion among local and international media, the courts, armed forces, and the police. Although it is known that hundreds of individuals were involved in carrying out the repression and violence, there is a lack of public accountability (Moulian 1998). Under these circumstances, victims have little recourse to achieve formal justice (Rojas 1998). In Latin and South American countries, governments have made concerted efforts to prevent the systematic denunciation of injustice and human rights violations (Jelin 1998). Paradoxically, “forgetting” seems to be a key element of the new collective memory for both the individual and the community. Collectively, individuals censor their thoughts, words, and activities to avoid recalling (and returning) to the horrors of the past in an effort to protect their lives. They allow forgetting to govern in order to pacify the present (Lira 1997). Societies emerging from periods of violence or trauma, like those in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, or El Salvador, often harbor competing and conflicting understandings of the past and intense struggles over memory. Chile offers one example of the complexities of such memorial transitions from mere reconciliation to social justice and reparation. Before coming to power, the Concertación—a coalition of the centrist Christian Democrats, the Socialist party and the Pro-Democracy party that came together to defeat Augusto Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite—emphasized the crimes of the dictatorship as a central element in their political discourse. In 1990, after the election of Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin as president, the promises of the Concertación shifted. Before the military government yielded power to Aylwin, the military made a provision that prohibited the Congress from investigating the crimes of the dictatorship or bringing constitutional accusations against its leaders (Moulian 1998, 18). The new democratic government had to mediate between two positions: the military, whose aim was to ensure a legacy of oblivion in the name of social peace, and those sectors of society affected by the years of repression who demanded not only justice but also a full disclosure of the truth about the past, particularly the atrocities committed by the military which included torture, summary executions, disappearances, illegal searches, and mass exile. Thus, President Patricio Aylwin’s government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which issued the Rettig Report in 1991) to investigate the human rights

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violations of the Pinochet regime in an attempt to build a bridge between private suffering and public recognition of past events (Lira 1997, 228). This investigative commission did not have the power to bring charges, initiate legal proceedings, or impose penalties on those involved. Nevertheless, it did represent a tacit acknowledgement of an “official story” of repression and state-sponsored terrorism. Although “torture” and “exile” are not mentioned specifically in the Rettig Report, this public acknowledgement was a step toward a kind of reconciliation. According to Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian, the Truth Commission provided the Concertación with a formula to sidestep its campaign promise to abolish the 1978 amnesty for crime law. The report spared the new government the task of challenging the military’s self-proclaimed impunity (Moulian 1998, 18). The new democratic government, fearing military reprisals while attempting to hold together an unstable political coalition, promoted a form of reconciliation (or forgetting) instead of justice. This political transition as reconciliation required forgiveness without further examination of the historical past or acknowledgement of wrongdoing and provided little legal access to justice (Frazier 1999). In particular, in the fall of 2003, with the thirtieth anniversary of the September 11, 1973, coup d’état that overthrew elected president Salvador Allende Gossens and installed General Augusto Pinochet in power, there was increasing interest on the long-term col-lective trauma induced by the military coup. Chilean communities abroad are still active in seeking justice and reparation, but little attention has been paid to their fragmented work and how it may contribute to achieving those goals. Similarly, there has been little examination of the role a “host” country plays in the search for justice and reparation. This chapter offers the description of one case study—Chileans in Vancouver, Canada—and works to document the organizing and education they have undertaken to bring remembrance to the public sphere. Overall, I suggest that this exemplary community-based work, when carefully adapted, can be useful in reorganizing similar efforts among other immigrant and exiled communities across North America. It will also, I hope, serve to examine one of the important and overlooked roles of immigrant communities within host countries and the responsibilities of the country toward the peoples it hosts. CIVIC EDUCATION: THE ORIGINS OF THE MEMORY AND JUSTICE GROUP In the context of political violence or war, political trauma includes a range of feelings such as pain, anguish, fear, loss, grief, displacement, and the destruction of a coherent and meaningful reality. Political trauma becomes chronic when the factors that caused the trauma remain intact. Clinical psychologists in Chile working with survivors of political violence have identified impunity—the absence of formal justice—as one of the mechanisms that instill insecurity and defenselessness in individuals and deny a possibility of future. Remembering and telling the truth about traumatic events are prerequisites for both the restoration of the social order and the healing of individual victims. Healing is impossible without legal mechanisms that sanction the perpetrators. In addition, these traumatic effects can be reexperienced every time the initial traumatic

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experience is unexpectedly remembered and, worse, reexperienced (Kleinman, 1995; Pantoja 2000; Herman 1992). This chapter describes the development of the Memory and Justice in the Americas Working Group (henceforth, the Memory and Justice Group), a community-based and public civic-education project that has two central objectives: the organization of an international tribunal in Vancouver, British Columbia, to denounce the violation of human rights that continue to take place in Latin America, and the implementation of what the group has theorized as a pedagogical and collective healing process, through educational workshops and activities aimed at recovering a form of collective memory in exile. As a therapist and one of the founding members of this group, I share an informal account of my experience: how the group was formed and organized, how our goals were identified, and how we defined and organized these collective pedagogical and political activities. In addition, I describe the theoretical concepts that buttress this project and point out some noteworthy activities, and the challenges and learning experiences that we encountered in the process. My contribution to the civic education project of the Memory and Justice Group stems directly from my master’s degree work in which I researched the power of historical landmarks to revive and reenact traumatic memory within individuals and social groups (e.g., political exiles) (Espinoza 2002). In my research, I focused on those historical events that have a potential to trigger traumatic memory. Thus, the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in October 1998 in London functioned as powerful memorial catalyst. Pinochet was arrested on an extradition order from Spain and was to stand trial for the murder of Spanish citizens in Chile during his seventeen-year military regime. Initially, Pinochet’s arrest infused those working in the area of human rights— and many Chileans—with a sense of hope for justice; his release sixteen months later seemed to quench all hope and was one more example of impunity that in various ways retraumatize can those who have chosen and/or have had to continue to live in exile. My research was guided by this central story of the arrest and subsequent release of Augusto Pinochet, and it charted the psychosocial impact it had on members of the Chilean exile community in Vancouver. Its findings helped the Memory and Justice Group identify healing as an important element/goal in organizing this tribunal.1 My research had indicated that perceptions of justice and individual trauma are deeply connected. The arrest of Pinochet had represented a possibility for justice and vindication of the participants’ experiences of imprisonment, torture, and forced exile. It also meant the international recognition of the atrocities committed during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Nevertheless, the legal proceedings that resulted in Pinochet’s release revived perceptions of injustice, anger, frustration, and mistrust in the international community, the formal legal system, and the Chilean government that supported Pinochet’s repatriation. EXILE LIVES WITHIN First, a brief discussion of the concepts of exile and trauma is in order because these concepts are central to the formation of the Memory and Justice Group and its civiceducation work. Exile involves psychosocial consequences such as an abrupt rupture of life projects; the loss of social and emotional networks of family, friends, and co-

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workers; the loss of a familiar landscape and geography; and the end of active participation in the everyday life of one’s country and, therefore, the loss of personal history, biography, and sense of identity (Dominguez 1984). One of the alternatives left for those in exile is to go back to their country, but this alternative in many cases poses a threat to life or of a new form of dislocation. At the emotional level, this form of dislocation brings up memories of traumatic events as well as old feelings of loss and grief (Van der Veer 1998). At a practical level, it represents inserting oneself in a country that is often very different from the one left behind at the time of exile. This produces a new kind of internal exile. The migration of political refugees to Canada started with the Chilean refugees soon after the coup d’état in 1973. The Canadian government, through a special program for Chileans called the Special Chilean Movement, was able to provide political asylum to many Chileans. By the end of 1978, 6,225 refugees had registered in this program, including two hundred political prisoners who arrived directly from jail (Gilbert and Lee 1986). Chilean exiles maintained an avid interest in the political situation in Chile while creating a new and hybrid political space within their “host” country. The local committees of solidarity with Chile denounced the Pinochet regime through testimonies of torture and imprisonment, which affected all Canadians (Gilbert and Lee 1986, 78). To the politicized Chileans who had lived through a political age in their home country, the experience of working in solidarity provided many exiles with a renewed sense of political commitment and bonding (Kay 1987). The institutionalization of the dictatorship in Chile and the political conflicts in Central America in the early 1980s gradually changed the dynamics of the Chilean solidarity groups in Vancouver. The arrival of large numbers of refugees from countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala gave the political work of the Chilean organizations a different direction, and it shifted their support to new social justice causes like the Farabundo Marti Liberation Movement of El Salvador or the work of the guerrillas in Guatemala. In the 1980s, new solidarity groups were formed to denounce the continued violations of human rights in Latin America, to secure the release of political prisoners, to find people who had disappeared for political reasons, and to organize fundraising activities (Gilbert and Lee 1986, 85). These new Latin American solidarity groups organized joint activities as a way to express solidarity among exiles as well as support for the different political struggles that haunted the continent. As the political situation in many countries changed in the 1990s, however, so did the nature of these events. The transition to democratic governments in Chile, the end of civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 changed the basis of the strong solidarity movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Lessie Jo Frazier (1999, 105) suggests the concept of “orphans of the past” to identify those veterans of the Chilean dictatorship (and exile veterans from other Latin American countries) who are now politically orphaned—apparent rebels without a cause—but who still write, think, and struggle to maintain networks as a way to work their way out of despair. This orphanage is augmented by a sense of marginality, that is, the vicarious way in which exiles live, feel, and react to the events happening in their former homeland. In this context, social/political memory becomes a contested and ghostly territory. The struggle between forgetting the past (to live a foreign present) and remembering it constantly gives rise to conflicting feelings. On the one hand, living for a long time in a different culture and speaking a different language seem to make the past

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disappear. On the other hand, the need to belong to a group and to maintain one’s cultural roots, identity, and history creates a social longing to remember. These conflicting feelings are augmented by the impossibility to achieve a sense of justice or even recognition of one’s experiences in the host country. Exiles do not completely feel they belong in their new lives, perhaps in part because they do not feel validated and vindicated in terms of the tragedy and the traumatic experiences they have lived. ATTRIBUTES OF COLLECTIVE TRAUMA A body of literature on the social psychology of trauma defines “trauma” as painful individual and group experiences that disrupt the social systems that commonly grant people a sense of control and connection with themselves and others. Trauma includes psychological and physical suffering. Collective trauma unravels the fabric of social life, damaging social bonds and eroding collective trust in the social structures. Halbwachs (1992) asserts that all memories are formed and organized within a collective context. Collective trauma can even affect those members of a community who were absent when the traumatic event (catastrophe or persecution) took place (Robben 2000). Therefore, at a sociocultural level, any work of social healing should also involve reconstructing a basic trust in social institutions as well as in the cultural practices that structure collective experience. These cultural practices may include memorial monuments and rituals. Most relevant to our organization of the Memory and Justice Group in Vancouver, it has been suggested that institutional acknowledgment in the form of historical investigative commissions such as the Chilean Rettig Commission can help restore a symbolic order that was destroyed by the collective trauma (Robben 2000, 85). In the Memory and Justice Group, we view collective trauma as a dialectical process between the individual and society. The social character of trauma requires that any healing process must include an exploration of its social roots, that is, its preexisting social conditions and historical context. The traumatic event is not only a restricted episode but also part of a traumatic sequence. Therefore, the concept of social trauma incorporates the history of the individual as well as the collective history (Martín-Baró 1994). This suggests that each individual memory is part of, or an aspect of, the social group; virtually all events, experiences, and perceptions—the stuff of memory—can be shared in one’s interactions with others. This sharing process, often mediated by language (Halbwachs 1992, 173), is also essential in remembering collective events. Halbwachs asserts that it is language, and the whole system of social conventions attached to it, that allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past.2 IDENTITY AND A FROZEN PAST Other additional attributes of memory figured prominently in our curricular design of a civic pedagogy at the Memory and Justice Group in Vancouver. First, memories play a role in maintaining a collective identity, which is a driving force for individuals to share in those memories as put forth by theorist Pierre Nora (1989) in his “law of remembrance”; the discovery of roots of belonging to some groups becomes a source of

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identity, and therefore belonging becomes a deep commitment. Second, collective memories are maintained through generations, and they are revitalized within generational cycles. Pennebaker and Banasik (1997) has observed that, approximately every twenty to thirty years, individuals and societies attempt to reconstruct their traumatic past. Some of the factors behind such memory cycles are (1) the acquisition of a psychological distance necessary to re-member (put back together in a new/different version) a collective traumatic event; (2) the necessary accumulation of social resources in order to undergo the commemorative activities (economic leverage); and (3) the change, after a few decades, of the sociopolitical repression that provoked the collective trauma in the first place (often because those directly responsible for the repression, war, and so on, have either socially or physically disappeared). Finally, the experience of political exile is often manifested as a form of memorial freezing that leads entire social groups to keep an emotional link with a latent past—the country, language, and culture as it was left behind—in order to make sense of their current and protracted exile experience. One of the many implications and manifestations of this memorial freezing is a tendency of individuals and groups to keep one particular retelling of the past alive, which new generations might see as quaint or sometimes downright deluded. In the Chilean community in Vancouver, a poignant example of this is the public work of Luis Llanillos, an older man who was an active militant of a leftwing political party in Chile and who had to leave his country as a result of the coup d’état. Llanillos is the producer and host of “Horizontes” a weekly radio show in the local Vancouver Coop Radio (a volunteer-supported “indie” radio station) that offers a compilation of current music, poetry, political analysis, and a standard fare of memories of the government of Salvador Allende. Over the years, his maverick work has functioned as a significant “memory keeper” for a dwindling group of local political exiles. His dedication and perseverance to keep the memory of the 1970s political period in Chile alive has earned him the respect and admira tion of many people in our community.3 FAST FORWARD TO THE PAST The organizing of the Memory and Justice Group has not followed a linear progression or a “fixed” methodology, but rather it represents an organic process of putting in action shared group reflections that are constantly evaluated to drive the project forward. Using the elements and collective knowledge described earlier—traumatic memory as collective bonding, memory as a crucial element to forge the exile identity, memory as predominantly transmitted through language and over several generations, and the memorial freezing in a somewhat idealized (albeit horrible) past as our homeland was when we had to come here—we at the Memory and Justice Group gradually developed two different approaches to reach out to the community. The first was a series of specific workshops for Latin American community workers who were directly in contact with members of the community and often needed specific information so as to refer their clients to specialized services such as child therapy, alcohol and drug counseling, or psychiatric services. The second approach was to design public workshops on the impact that traumatic experiences have on families and communities.4

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The idea of organizing an international tribunal in Vancouver originated at a March 2002 community forum organized by Christian Task Force on Central America, a Vancouver-based Latin American human rights organization. The objective of the forum was to discuss the issue of impunity in Latin America and to identify possible responses from exile communities. The participants—refugees and immigrants from Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Argentina—identified common political and social experiences such as forced exile, loss of lives, and individual/collective trauma, in addition to their collective experience of U.S. intervention in their country of origin. Later, when we brainstormed community-based activist and educational initiatives, the idea of a community-based tribunal became attractive because it would provide a local, national, and international forum to denounce past and current violations of human rights in Latin America. It would also offer an opportunity to call public attention to the persistent impunity in the entire region. This group became The Memory and Justice Group, and most of its members have worked on a variety of human rights issues or settlement-and-integration projects in the Latin American community. Next, we researched, analyzed, and reflected on the experiences of other Latin American groups and projects and strategized about how to best present this project to the community in engaging and interactive ways. Although we paid attention to issues of representation and diversity, we realized that one of the greatest challenges was to create trust amongst the participants. With this in mind, we invited people from different countries and backgrounds to participate in the organizing committee and the other subcommittees. Mistrust of others and institutions is always present in the Latin American community, and its origins are complex—sometimes a direct consequence of trauma, and other times the result of previous disappointments of having worked in groups of this nature. Based on these experiences, we established some principles for our group, such as consistency and transparency, that would guide our actions and public discourse. Members of the organizing committee gravitated toward two areas of work, one related to collective healing and the other related to legal reparation. Once these two areas were defined broadly, we identified specific tasks in each area. The participation of the Latin American community would be community based and peer driven: the focus is on the lived experience of exile (or politically active) members of the Latin American community. At a meso level, we would seek mainstream Canadian support to witness our process, a role that, contrary to common belief, is active and engaged. Thus, we began to call on a number of individuals who had provided support to human rights solidarity campaigns in the past. At a macro level, we sought institutional support and partnerships in universities, the legal system, labor unions, local school boards, and human rights organizations such as The Vancouver Association for the Survivors of Torture (VAST), Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. To introduce the entire project to the community at large, we organized a forum entitled “Politics of Memory in the Americas: From Truth Commissions to Democratic Tribunals” at Simon Fraser University. The objective was to initiate a debate about politics of memory represented in government initiatives and community ones, as well as to introduce the idea of an international tribunal. Our target audience included academics, students, human rights activists, and members of the Latin American community.5 The panelists promoted a debate of the pros and cons of government-sponsored investigative truth commissions, their relevance in promoting emotional healing to those affected, and

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the role of collective memory in the healing process. The forum allowed us to seek a common language and context regarding collective trauma, its meanings, impacts, and possible resolutions/reparations. We invited people to reflect on the fact that exiles often experience traumatization by being exposed to political violence or war and that telling the truth about traumatic experiences as well as being witnessed in the process are healing experiences both for individuals and groups.6 Therefore, the testimonies provided by the participants in the tribunal may not only help to denounce the violations of human rights but they may also provide a venue for emotional healing. The process of organizing this tribunal may also be healing, as the process included the recovery of collective histories in exile. Through workshop and activities, we promoted the reconstruction and therefore the validation of our cultural and political experiences in Canada. We also highlighted the potential benefits of a community-based project that would allow members of the community to participate in the planning, development, and organization of this tribunal. Finally, we invited the participants to register in different subcommittees to ensure their ongoing involvement. The response and enthusiasm of the community was overwhelming. The organizational structure of the group centered on two main pillars: the Healing and Public Education Committee, and the Legal Committee. (The structure is likely to change according to people’s interests, levels of participation and the demands of the organization of the tribunal itself.) The Healing Committee was formed on the assumption that civic education restores collective memory. This committee has as a goal to prepare the communities for the emotional strain involved in witnessing and providing testimonies during a tribunal of this nature. The Healing Committee is composed of psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, and those who have a professional and/or personal interest in working to educate members of the Latin American community about the effects of trauma and in providing counseling services for members of the community. The objectives of this committee are to inform and educate members of the Latin American community about trauma and its effects through workshops, informal talks, radio programs, artistic activities, and the production of educational material. Most activities are designed to promote the reconstruction of a collective memory in our community (videos, forums, etc.). In addition, the Healing Committee assists the work of other committees within the group in issues related to the clinical and theoretical aspects of trauma. At present, this committee is developing a support network of mental health professionals to provide counseling services to the members of the committee and to those involved in the project in general. The members of the Legal Committee are involved in the legal field or members of human rights organizations such as HIJOS (Spanish term for sons and daughters, or children), a group of young people whose parents were political prisoners or who were disappeared and killed by military regimes in Latin America. The work of the Legal Committee focuses on the structure of the tribunal as well as finding the necessary financial resources and local, national, and international support. First the committee members examined similar community-based projects that have been undertaken by community groups in Canada and identified the fact that none of these tribunals included a healing component. More often than not, these tribunals have focused on violation of human rights in a particular country, which has not contributed to the active inclusion of

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all members of the local Latin American communities. In contrast, we designed this tribunal to be driven by the themes that are common to the historical and political experiences of countries in Latin America (e.g., human rights violations, political exile as the cradle of specific subject positions/identities, the freezing of memory, memory transmitted by a common language, etc.).7 MEMORY THUS FAR…ORGANIZING A TRIBUNAL A tribunal is to embody a collective desire or dream for justice and healing. Our idea begins where the current Latin American governments have failed; it offers potent symbolic avenues—and civic educational action—toward social justice, acknowledgment, reparation, and healing to communities in exile. A tribunal will also inform some of the ongoing impunity in Latin America. We dream of devoting a week to cultural and artistic activities and unveiling a mural representing our experience in Vancouver. It is difficult to say how much of this dream can be achieved—so far, we know it will take two to three years to accomplish our goal. The tribunal per se will be conducted following the same format and protocols of a real international tribunal. The judges and other people involved will be trained in the legal aspects of listening to testimonies and evidence and making legal decisions based on international law. The difference is that this tribunal is being organized at a grassroots level and the “sentencing” will have only a symbolic meaning—instead of a monument, this is a social performance that is vital and alive, it will exist among people in the community, and it will be carried away by each individual who participates. However, the healing experience for the witnesses and the larger Latin American community is likely to emerge from the mutual recognition of their experiences, the international impact of the tribunal, and the possibility that the victims can initiate legal procedures in their countries of origin. A tribunal of this nature offers a lived experience of justice and recognition, even when a full process of emotional reparation would require punishment of the perpetrators. Finally, a tribunal is likely to call national and international audiences to be witnesses to our individual and collective trauma and to promote similar community-based initiatives worldwide. Thus far, the challenges of the process have been many, and we have learned a great deal from them. We have identified varying degrees of emotional readiness among the members of the Latin American community to commit to this project. As noted earlier, there seems to be a generational cycle, in which different groups have different levels of preparedness for looking back at their past traumatic history and dealing with it. For example, we have noticed that members of the Chilean community seem to be prepared and willing to commit to this project, which coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the coup d’état (September 11, 1973). In contrast, individuals from recent exile communities (e.g., Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and Mexico) seem reluctant to get emotionally or politically involved in the direct, grassroots, albeit formal, ways demanded by a tribunal. We hope that our collective dream of justice and our civic-education project will help many people—especially those shipwrecked in a frozen political/emotional past—to resolve some of their trauma and move forward in their healing process. At the same

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time, the international exposure and acknowledgment that we hope to achieve will provide the validation that we need, individually and collectively, to begin the emotional healing of the traumatic experiences we have survived. Finally, we hope that this experience will encourage and assist other groups and communities to develop similar community-based initiatives. NOTES 1. These are Chileans who fled their homeland due to political persecution after the 1973 coup d’état. Although it is a small group in numbers, their experience has special significance by virtue of their continued exile in spite of the democratization and neoliberal economic development of Chile. 2. The relationship among memory, language, and identity in the process of civic education and collective healing is paramount to our work at the Memory and Justice Committee. For instance, our need to speak English in order to function in Canadian society affects the ways we relate to Spanish, our mother tongue, and ultimately the ways we relate to each other. Immigrant are often socialized—at times actively encouraged in their workplace or other public spaces—to switch into the dominant language, thus surrendering to a different form of social interaction. However, there still are individuals, older people or recent immigrants, within Latino communities who do not speak English. We attempt to compensate the supremacy of the dominant language and how it might erode our collective memories by using Spanish in our activities and public events. 3. There will always be new waves of political exiles and/or displaced individuals, but it is unlikely that the same combinantion of social, historical, and political circumstances of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America would be replicated. However, the case of Luis Llanillos has parallels in other migrant communities. These individuals are often regarded as oddities and not valued as memory keepers. Also, the depth of their trauma and signficance is often overlooked. I place him as an exemplary case to achieve this latter type of examination: to honor his work. 4. The Jewish Holocaust was an important reference point/traumatic story, given its similarities to some of the sociopolitical trauma suffered by exiled Latinos, especially in relation to its long-term effects and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. It also provides an emotional distance to explore painful and sometimes prickly issues. We organized two presentations on this topic: a testimony by Saul Khon, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and a presentation by psychologist, Dr. Alina Wydra, one of the organizers of the “Kesher Project” a project that included survivors of the Holocaust and children of survivors. The participants used painting, writing, and poetry to recover their historical memory. Through this process they were able to start talking about their traumatic experiences. 5. The panelists were former Guatemalan judge Henry Monroy, who presided over the investigation of the murder of Archbishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City; Dr. Pilar Riaño Alcalá, a Colombian anthropologist whose work centers on memory and violence (she is featured in this collection); Dr. Marla Arvay, an assistant professor in the department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education of the University of British Columbia, who specializes in the vicarious effects of bearing witness to trauma testimonies. Dr. Avray is also a former member of an international working group that worked with the South African Truth Commission. The moderator was Dr. John Brohman, director of the Latin American Studies program at Simon Fraser University. 6. My iterative use of the linguistic trope of “truth” (as often used in the “Commissions of Truth” in Latin America) does not imply that there is one single, examinable, and monolithic truth. Often, truth is the archival and overarching story a community forges collectively to

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tell the best possible story, the most appropriate representation. (See Ibáñez-Carrasco, Ph.D. Thesis Simon Fraser University, 1999). 7. Eventually, members of this committee, in consultation with all the project participants, will suggest the name of those who will be the “judges” in the tribunal. Some of the names that might be considered are former Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and writers such as Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende, and Ariel Dorfman.

REFERENCES Dominguez, Rosario, 1984. Psicoterapia de un niño Chileno exiliado y retornado (Psychotherapy of an exiled and returned Chilean boy.) In Psicoterapia y Represión Politica (Psychotherapy and political repression), edited by Elizabeth Lira, Eugenia Weinstein, Rosario Dominguez, Juana Kovalskys, Adriana Maggi, Eliana Morales and Fanny Pollarolo. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Erikson, Kay. 1995. Notes on trauma and community. In Trauma explorations in memory, edited by C.Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Espinoza, Adriana E. 2002. The collective trauma story: Personal meaning and the recollection of traumatic memories in Vancouver’s Chilean Community. Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Frazier, Lessie Jo. 1999. “Subverted memories:” Countermourning as political action in Chile. In Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present, edited by M.Bal, J.Crewe, and L.Spitzer. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Gilbert, Jorge, and Mario Lee. 1986. The bridge between Canada and Latin America. Vancouver: Two-Thirds Editions. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books. Jelin, Elizabeth. 1998. The mindfields of memory. NACLA Report on the Americas 32: 23–29. Kay, Diane. 1987. Chileans in exile: Private struggles, public lives. Hampshire, UK: The Macmillan Press. Kleinman, Arthur. 1995. Violence, culture, and the politics of trauma. In Writings at the margin: Discourse between anthropology and medicine, edited by A.Kleinman. Berkley: University of California Press. Lira, Elizabeth. 1997. Remembering: Passing back through the heart. In Collective memory of political events: Social psychological perspectives, edited by J.Pennebaker, D.Paez, and B.Rimé. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Martín-Baró, Ignacio. 1994. Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Moulian, Tomás. 1998. A time of forgetting: The myths of the Chilean transition. NACLA Report on the Americas 32:16–22. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between memory and history: Rethinking the French past, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Pantoja, Jorge. 2000. Notes of the clinical team of FASIC. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones FASIC. Pennebaker, James W. and Becky L.Banasik, On the creation and maintenance of collective memories: History as social psychology. In Collective memory of political events: Social psychological perspectives, edited by J.Pennebaker, D.Paez, and B. Rimé. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. Report of the Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Vol.1. 1993. Notre Dame, Ind.: Centre for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame Law School

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Riquelme, Horacio. 1994. Human rights and psychological health in South America. In Era in twilight: Psychocultural situation under state terrorism in Latin America, edited by H.Riquelme. Bilbao, Spain: Instituto Horizonte S.L. Robben, Antonius. 2000. The assault on basic trust: Disappearances, protest, and reburial in Argentina.” In Cultures under siege: Collective violence and trauma, edited byA. C.G.M.Robben and M.Suárez-Orozco. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Rojas, Paz. 1998. Impunity and the inner history of life. In Documents of the corporation for the promotion and the defense of human rights of the people. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones CODEPU. Van der Veer, Gus. 1998. Counselling and therapy with refugees and victims of trauma: Psychological problems of victims of war, torture and repression. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons.

Section 2 Audiences to Participants

5 THEATER FORUM AT THE URBAN ODYSSEY SCHOOL A Case Study Michael Sanders [The theater experience] helped me realize that by sitting by and doing nothing I can achieve nothing. But by doing something little I can make a difference. The skits helped me see that one person can make a difference in social change in that one person can multiply into other persons in the cause…even the slightest action can have a ripple effect and start a change —Urban Odyssey school student

This chapter describes one community-based pedagogical and theatrical project in which actors, teachers, writers, storytellers, and musicians collaborated to provide inner-city adolescents (ages 14 through 17) with experiences that they would not normally have as part of their formal schooling—the “null curriculum”—a gray curricular area that “accentuate[s] the relationship between identity, politics, experience, pedagogy and dis/engagement and the process of learning” (Ibrahim 2000, 58). The project is a free school called the Urban Odyssey. In particular, this is the story about racism at this “free summer school” designed to provide inner-city youth with transitivity and dialogue through the use of the technologies of creative writing, musicology, and a participatory theatrical experience. The Urban Odyssey operates with a grant from the state of Ohio in conjunction with Cleveland State University. The university provides classrooms when needed, a theater, passes for library and computer lab use, and passes for the university recreational facilities. The grant provides faculty and staff salaries, transportation for all off-campus activities, food for students and staff, honoraria for visiting lecturers (professional actors, storytellers, musicians, scientists, and others), tickets (for museums, galleries, boat rides, amusement parks, theatrical productions), and other incentives (graphing calculators, books, CDs, etc). At the Urban Odyssey, young students choose one, from a total of eight, courses of study as their focus for three consecutive weeks for five hours each day. In the project described here, participants chose to work in the area of creative writing in relation to racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, and other social, cultural, and political struggles/challenges. In this course, emphasis was placed on exploring how mass media influences our cultural perceptions and practices toward ourselves and others (e.g., we studied some of the history and evolution of African American music). Last year, the teachers and I decided to use theories of Paulo Freire’s (1998) Pedagogy of the Freedom as well as theories and exercises developed by Augusto Boal in Theatre of the Oppressed, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, and Legislative

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Theatre (Boal 1990, 1992, 1998) and Teaching to Transgress (hooks 1994).1 The remainder of this chapter describes the outcomes and challenges involved in the implementation of these ideas in our particular sociocultural and socioeconomic context. For four years I (a white male often mistaken for a Hispanic or Persian) have been involved in Urban Odyssey as grant writer, director, and facilitator. The rest of the team was composed of one white female (the creative writing teacher) and one African American male (the teacher of evolution of African music and coordinator of student radio productions). The students included one Puerto Rican-American female (age 15), three African American males (one age 15 and two age 17), five African American females (ages 14 through 17), and one Asian American male (age 17). Our students are recruited through flyers sent to every secondary school in the area, visits to school guidance offices, and word of mouth. Because our school is funded with a grant from the state of Ohio, we are required to prove that each student exhibits a “talent” in at least one content area at their school. A talent could be identified by a high score on a test of proficiency, by an exemplary example of student work, or by a talent exhibited in visual or performing arts. Teachers who know students can recommend that they be considered to be talented in a particular area. We do our best to admit as many students as possible to the school. The entire budget of the grant is used to implement the school; we provide students with passes for public transportation to come to the activities, and often we are able to provide meals. No tuition or fees are required to attend the Urban Odyssey school. The children who chose to take the class received no academic credit or direct financial incentives for engaging in the work.2 Each day the teachers in Urban Odyssey chose a different meeting place around the city for its relevance to the contents of the course. Frequently, we started the day on the campus of the inner-city university and moved out from there to use as many urban public spaces as possible for observation and discussion. Each teacher or group of teachers set up a schedule of sites for the students to visit that would contribute to their studies at the school. For example, in our writing and music class, we took our students to the African-American History Museum (to help in their study of the history of racism) and to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to forge an understanding of the history and evolution of African music. We also invited a Latino drumming specialist, a hiphop/breakdance performer/teacher, and a group of professional storytellers to work with the students. Our school lives up to its name by providing students with an urban odyssey—a travel through a city fraught with characters, possibilities, and challenges. CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH WRITING AND ACTING Our experience is that the raising of a critical consciousness is not generally what our students experience as a result of their regular school’s curricula. This pedagogical venture attempts to raise our consciousness both as educators and students through writing plays in a pedagogical/ performative process. As teachers in the creative writing class on racism, we believe that through the use of a “radical constructivist pedagogy” (Reigler 2000), and given sufficient opportunity for the development of a consciousness of ourselves as human/social beings and a desire to explore the possibilities of action in

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the world within the context of texts such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified by the United Nations (1948), we may develop a more transitive approach to our lives that prepares us not merely to observe but to participate in local struggles for equality and social justice—what is often termed consciousness raising. Consciousness raising is one self-reflexive and critical approach to developing a sense of being, inhabiting—both physically and intellectually—in the sociocultural world (Freire 1995). The tools of a consciousness-raising method known as the “Forum Theatre” developed by Brazilian educator Augusto Boal were chosen as the most appropriate to encourage our students to reexperience their work (which is often autobiographical) through creative and democratic writing and performing.3 Theater is by nature collaborative and intended to compel all of us to find collective new voices and ways of seeing and acting in our world. Augusto Boal discards traditional conventions of dramatic action by erasing the boundary between the actor and the spectator in theater.4 He chooses instead the idea of people as agents of change in the “Forum Theatre” (Boal 1998, 18) that compels spectators and actors to work together—what could be roughly translated as a “spectactor”—to choose an issue, a “political issue,” to be addressed as theatrical performance. Thus, Forum Theatre is a sort of socio-pedagogical game with rules that encourage active political participation. The nature of each character must be clearly delineated by the actors; solutions proposed by the protagonist must contain at least one “issue” to be analyzed during the forum session to avoid creating didactic propaganda theater. Style doesn’t matter as long as the objective is to discuss concrete situations through the medium of theater. Furthermore, each character must be presented visually so as to be recognized independently of the spoken script. This image of the world is presented once. The audience of “spectactors” (spectators/actors) is asked if they agree with the solutions of the protagonist, and they often say “no.” The play is performed again exactly the way it was first performed and, at any point in the action, the spectactors may intervene to change the vision of the world as it is into the world as it should be. Spect-actors simply approach the “stage” and call to “stop” the current action. They then take on the role of the character whose motivations they are questioning by shifting positions from spectator to actor. We not only have to critique what we see as wrong, but we also have to do something constructive about it through acting it out. The game continues as spect-actors strive to break the oppression imposed by the dramatic situation. When the forum is over, models of actions for the future may have been constructed and played out by the actors and spect-actors (Boal 1998). TRANSITIVITY AND THE SCHOOL Transitivity (the opposite of living life as intransitive pawns in the lives of a privileged elite) is not merely tolerated; rather, it is actively sought. Transitivity is not merely thinking about action but taking action toward a direct object. For example, in the school, students were able not only to recognize racism within the context of their communities but also to formulate actions that they could take to attempt to resist the racism that they formerly merely perceived. Our school team recognized that communication on a micro level (e.g., the classroom) may never be explored at a macro level (e.g., the community at

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large); a possibility exists that the students will explore ways in which they may be active in the formation of liberatory consciousness within their communities. “What people learn or want to do or dream about is embedded in particular micro- or macro-cultural systems” (Woolcott 1983, 7). The writing class to prepare the Forum Theatre on racism was carried out partly in a traditional class process insofar as teachers and students met together in a room and sat in a circle listening to one another and exchanging ideas. The purpose of the writing class was to explore issues of racism and to provide an initial context. In a true interdisciplinary style, other classes supported this main Forum Theatre project. In the music class, we learned about the roots of world music in Africa and its diffusion around the world through the music of the displaced African slaves. We were exposed to black music in all the Americas and to significant landmarks in the evolution of African American pop music. The purpose of this was to make us all aware of the African diaspora and some of the cultural roots of various types of oppression. The students experienced a variety of activities that included a Latin percussion workshop and a workshop on the culture of American hip-hop (they learned to scratch and to dance various street dances). The African music class teacher was a DJ at a local radio station. In addition, our students wrote and produced public-service announcements that were aired during the school day and after. They also produced an entire call-in radio show to showcase African music and promote a discussion on racism. During this process, we encouraged them to keep writing in any genre they chose: poetry, short stories, life histories, scripts, and songs. We often asked students to revisit the many aspects of racism and to relate it to their lived experience. Our Asian American male student told us, Racism rhymes with sexism, ageism, and ableism. They all spell hate. A boy walked past the corner and saw a fellow boy sitting on the porch. But walking boy was Asian and sitting boy black. The Asian boy waved but sitting black boy gave him a finger and made fun of his language. The Asian boy ran home with fury and rage. In the ensuing discussion, some African American students did not believe that the Asian American youth’s experience could be called racism. They were unwilling to consider that an African American person would act in a racist manner toward an Asian American person. One African American student suggested that the African American boy might have thought that the Asian American boy was a homosexual making sexual advances toward him. We discussed why the word “faggot” has become a common pejorative in city schools. Few remain free from suspicion about its embodiments as hatred and violence. Other students told autobiographical stories about experiencing racism, while some said they have never had such an experience. This served to show students how they could understand multiple oppressions and to help them understand that in a given situations they have more or less power, legitimacy, or risk.

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SOCIAL ACTION: ACTING IN THE THEATER OF THE EVERYDAY [W]e had to come up with characters, a setting, a conflict, and dialogue. We didn’t really write much other than our scripts but even with writing those I had to think about it and it was just like writing a story or poem. It takes a lot of thought. We were able to apply our writing skills to reallife experiences and make decisions about how they can be changed for the better. —Urban Odyssey school student

Using the main ideas generated in the previous discussion, students participated in an activity called “Image Theater” (Boal 1992). Image Theatre is a series of physical exercises and games designed to uncover social problems seemingly inherent in societies, cultures, self, and sociocultural representations, etc. Using their own and others’ bodies as “clay,” participants are to “sculpt” statues that represent their experiences, feelings, ideas, oppressions, and/or dreams into a tableau vivant. We modeled the initial tableau vivant to our team; it was intended to be stereotypical and thought provoking. The female white teacher posed as the Statue of Liberty; a black student crouched at her feet looking up toward her face; a male white teacher hid behind the statue and reached around her to point an imaginary gun at the head of the black student. The image intended to symbolically sketch what a minority person might experience in their contact with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). We discussed the possible meanings that could be read from this image; the students agreed that it reflected one vision of racism. Students were then asked to create images from their own experiences of racism.5 Discussion followed the creation of each image, as students voiced their opinions and feelings about the images. By the end of the first day, we all felt eager to infuse movement and dialogue into their still images. On the second day, the participants were divided into two groups to create a script for a skit they would later act out for the other group. Each group knew that the participants were asked to be the writers and actors of their own skit and the spect-actors of the other. There were no time limits or other requirements to curtail the creation of the skits. In this stage of the process, the teachers performed as spect-actors for both groups only if the students needed help in clarifying the elements of the situation. Most significantly, teachers/facilitators took on a role of “difficultators” or “jokers” who point out levels of complexity in a given situation that had been overlooked or oversimplified by the spectactors.6 One of the theater skits was set in an imaginary classroom. The actors were an African American female “teacher” and three “students” (one African American female, one Asian American male, and one African American male). In the scene, the teacher is teaching a math class and asking students simple arithmetical questions. All three students raise their hands to answer the question, but the teacher will call on only the

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African American male for answers. The teacher then asks the class to work on individual projects and leaves the room. The African American male (a “rude boy”) moves to sit beside the African American female. He begins to ask her to go out with him, to ask for her phone number, and to make what seem to be sexual innuendos toward her. She tells him to go away and leave her alone, but he persists. The Asian American student stands up and begins to defend the female’s choice for privacy: “Look, why don’t you just leave her alone?” The African American male begins to hurl racial slurs toward the Asian American male: “Why don’t you just sit your skinny Asian ass down?” The skit ends. The actors then began to play the skit again in an abbreviated form. The students who were not actors played out their roles as spect-actors. The first student to say “stop” exchanged places with the teacher character in the skit and changed her dramatic actions so that this teacher character called on all of the students in the class and not just one person. At the second “stop,” a student took the place of the Asian American boy. He stood up to the rude boy and said, “I don’t appreciate you bothering her.” Once again the rude boy says, “Why don’t you just sit your skinny Asian ass down?” The student said, “I really don’t appreciate you calling me names like that.” In the discussion that followed, several students said that the teacher was clearly racist and sexist in her actions toward the class. The use of terms such as “racism” “sexism” “misogyny,” and others became a form of linguistic shorthand that allowed us to succinctly apply theories that had been reviewed in-depth earlier in the class. However, we recognized that this linguistic shorthand use can be simplistic and needs to be interrogated at every step—What do we mean by “racism” in this particular case? How is it manifested? How is it similar or different to other instances of racism we encounter in our everyday lives (including school life)? Furthermore, students said that the actions of the rude boy toward the Asian American were both racist and able-ist (the slur of “skinny” was interpreted to mean that the student was weak because of his size). The students said that it often happens in classrooms that if someone stands up to face another student, it is an action perceived to be confrontational, “calling someone out to fight.” They also said that the situation could be prickly if a substitute teacher was present because often substitute teachers do not enforce any of the classroom or school rules. Finally, someone pointed out that the girl could have stood up for herself and firmly asked the rude boy to move away from her so that she would not be bothered. As teachers/facilitators, we tried hard to resist participating in these discussions given our potential privilege and authority. We often remained in the periphery on how the situation presented in the skit had to be resolved. Once students have been given opportunities to examine subtle but pervasive forms of oppression inherent in many local and everyday situations, they gradually begin to articulate sophisticated thinking about them. One of our students expressed this thinking eloquently: [For me, doing this skit showed] that black people can be just a racist as whites, sometimes more. It taught me how to deal with racism better, taking a stand. There are many solutions to problems. I came to the realization that racism occurs in day-to-day life and can be sometimes dismissed as humor. It also caused me to think about the little things and how they are affected by racism. I also realized that it’s important to recognize racism and do something to make a change.

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Students began to recognize layers and hues of oppression; more than one “ism” can be deployed through a single act (e.g., the teacher acting as both a racist and a sexist). In addition, we began to see that a change in one pro- or antagonist (like the spect-actors in the skit) might not be sufficient to effect change. We began to envision ways in which local forms of social action/acting can potentially change social circumstances and create a ripple effect. For example, in the school skit, our initial belief was that acceptance accompanied by anger or rage is the only recourse we have in order to confront unfair use of privilege or the presence of prejudice. Image Theatre helped us transform this belief into a consciousness that strategic social action and solidarity can be more viable responses to privilege and prejudice than unexamined rage or even compassion. We perceive that social action is acting in the theater of the everyday, an acting that can potentially stimulate in our students a desire to actively move—through praxis—from an intransitive form of social consciousness to a transitive one (Freire 1998). SCHOOL ENDS: THE URBAN ODYSSEY BEGINS The creative writing teacher noted a change in students’ writing after the students had finished the theater-forum experience. She stated: The Theater of the Oppressed deepened their knowledge and allowed them in some cases to feel what it is like to be oppressed, and when we are able to feel information we are given an opportunity in which we may choose to create a path towards change. If we can’t feel and acquire a sense of empathy, then it is difficult to be motivated to stop hate and create change. The Theater of the Oppressed gives students an opportunity to feel and ultimately an opportunity to understand the power they have to stop hate and establish change. Indeed, our students had explored the ways in which they could make change in their lives within their communities. We all saw what change looks like so that we could simulate it in some way in our own everyday. We have no guarantees that our students or ourselves as professionals will (be able to) implement our knowledge within our “real life” communities. We had, however, given ourselves and our young students several opportunities to engage in the larger urban community through public-service announcements (they ran for several months on the campus radio station), radio call-in talk shows, and their community performances. At the end of the three-week school we had a public celebration to showcase the students’ work in all areas. Because our school is funded by the state of Ohio, parents are given a questionnaire about the school that they mail directly to the state Department of Education. Our feedback from the state did not include any critical feedback for the school. We received phone calls from parents expressing gratitude for the opportunity that their children had to participate in the school and pride in their children’s accomplishments. We asked the students to give us some feedback about their experience in the school. Most of that feedback was simple “feel good” reflections on the school. This is not surprising because the majority of the students have never had an educational experience like it. The grant allows students to

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attend the school for two years. Perhaps the most telling feedback from students is the fact that many return to the school for another year. Some return to take the same class because they enjoyed it the first time around. Others come for a different class in an area that interests them. The students go their way. We may see them on the street or at the grocery store. We can never be certain that the lessons taught are applied to the world in which the students live. This year we happened to see a newspaper article about a former student. This student, in the creative writing class, had been in the United States for three years. When he came to the Urban Odyssey school he was sixteen years old, fluent only in Mandarin and French and with limited English language skills. Three years later he had become an outspoken activist and scholar, started a chapter of Amnesty International at his school, and was later invited to attend an Ivy League school. We would like to think that we provided something at our school that he took away, a fragment of that broken time and space. The quotes that close this chapter are excerpted from the final performance by the creative writing class.7 Students read or recited short poems they had written around various topics of social issues and using the leitmotif “you don’t live on my street.” They seem to be an appropriate corollary for the experiences described in this chapter.

So you want to know why I’m always high? Have you never ever seen me cry? But why do I do all this junk? Have you ever seen your daddy sloppy drunk? Sure, I would like to have more knowledge, But my dad drunk up all my money for college. So how can you look at people with such conceit When you don’t even live on my street? So, you want to know why I dropped out of school? How many times can you be called a fool? Ever since I been in first grade I been called slow. So, I never gave the answer even if I did know. And how was I supposed to concentrate when I can’t even think about the last time I ate? Do you live every day with your feet? Naw? Then you don’t live on my street. —spoken word produced by Urban Odyssey students for their final public performance project The Urban Odyssey continues to experiment in collaboration with students and parents. Teachers working for three weeks in the summer often find other employment that is

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more lucrative or move away from the city. Some years we are able to reach more students in our recruitment efforts than others. We often have to restructure the school to fit a variety of contingencies. The grant that funds the school is a competitive one, so we do not know from year to year if we will have funds to operate the school. Unlike most public schools, we have to reconstruct ourselves each year hoping we will have money, community support, and students who are willing and able to attend the school. We hope we will continue to implement social action that actively promotes and achieves social justice. NOTES 1. My interest originated in my participation in conferences of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed in 2002 in Toledo, Ohio, and in 2003 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at which community activists, theatrical companies, academics, and students of all ages shared theories and experiences using the popular education methodologies of the Theatre of the Oppressed. I also attended workshops run by Augusto Boal to learn techniques to apply principles of interactive communitybased theatrical presentations to issues and problems chosen by community members as those that are most pertinent to their epistemologically privileged lived experiences within the broader contexts of their communities and relationships within social “organizations.” 2. All of the research activities I undertook throughout this project were supervised by the Cleveland State University Internal Review Board. The students and parents consented to participate in this work. Neither students’ or co-teachers’ names appear in this text, to ensure confidentiality. 3. Augusto Boal has developed, since the 1960s, a performative process of consciousness raising whereby audience members could work collaboratively, setting up plays based on local, relevant, and sociopolitical issues. In a dialectical process, participants double as performers and audience; they can stop a performance and suggest different actions for their peer actors, who then carry out their peer-audience suggestions. Boal proposes that, through this democratic participation (and demystification of the research/artistic/performative process), the audience members can became empowered not only to imagine change but to move it into social action (praxis). Boal has developed the Forum Theatre and the Image Theatre. Forum Theatre relies on presentation of short scenes that represent problems of a given community such as gender for a conference on women or racial stereotyping for a class on racism. Audience members interact by replacing characters in scenes and by improvising new solutions to the problems being presented. Image Theatre uses individuals to sculpt events and relationships, sometimes to the accompaniment of a narrative (Patterson 1999). To locate training centers and theatrical production companies around the world that use the work of Boal, visit www.unomaha.edu/~pto/. 4. This blurring of the boundaries and roles between audiences and actors was a direct challenge to our conventional power differential between teachers and students. 5. Image Theatre utilizes blind casting in that any actor can play a person of any ethnicity or gender as long as the spectators know what role is being played. It is often intriguing to see actors struggling to play against the grain of their own stereotypes. 6. As it is the case in literature and in the storytelling traditions of many Aboriginal peoples in the Americas, the “joker” is often a character who often plays a significant role in issueoriented, problem-solving, and collaborative theater. It often represents the contingencies, the antagonists, and sometimes our own ambivalence toward one issue, person, or social group.

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7. The students wrote poems, stories, skits, essays, and songs around how they perceived oppression in the world. They were encouraged to use other writing, film, television, music, and the like as the basis for their work. For their final performance, students chose to illustrate instances of oppression in a spoken-word performance. Their work has been excerpted throughout the text. I am profoundly indebted to the participation of these students.

REFERENCES Boal, Augusto. 1990. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group. ——. 1992. Games for actors and non-actors. London: Routledge. ——. 1998. Legislative theatre: Using performance to make politics. London: Routledge. Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. ——. 1998. Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. General Assembly of the United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Author. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Ibrahim, Awad. 2000. Whassup homeboy? Black/popular culture and the politics of “Curriculum Studies”: Devising an anti-racism perspective. In Power, knowledge, and anti-racism education, ed. G.Sefa Dei and A.Calliste. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Patterson, Doug. 1999. Augusto Boal biography. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press. Reigler, A. 2000. What is radical constructivism and who are its proponents? www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/about.html Woolcott, Harry. 1983. Adequate schools and inadequate education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly.

6 WRITE IT, GET IT Motivating Youth Writers Michael Hoechsmann As a generation, we have been called (and may even have become) passive and apathetic in attitude We have something to say, and I plan to make a difference. Let our voice be heard. —Sombra Fernandez, Young People’s Press As any socially-conscious teen of the nineties will confirm, today’s concerns go far beyond what kind of jobs are waiting when we’re finished university, or whether women will get equal pay for those jobs. Past these shining causes are those beasts which lie at the feet of my generation. In an age where the middle class is vanishing to give way to a massive lower class, an elite upper class, and a huge gap in between, the warriors of the next century will have to deal with more economic problems than just their own. —Samantha Bernstein, Young People’s Press Life isn’t about money, having a big house and letting machines do all the work. Life isn’t about designer clothes and expensive cars. Life is about joy, love, peace and creativity. It’s about learning who you are and not having someone else tell you…. When I hear a tune, I’m going to sing When I feel a beat, I’m going to dance and when I dance, I’ll do it with all my soul…. When I have something to say, I will say it, and my thoughts will be heard. —Mai Ling, Young People’s Press

As an underemployed doctoral student thrown on the dole one summer, I had the opportunity to work for Young People’s Press (YPP), a community-based non-profit organization that offers a national newswire service for Canadian youth ages 14 to 24. Established in 1995, the mandate of this news agency is to give “voice” to youth, specifically by offering workshops and editorial assistance to fledgling young writers with a specific emphasis on youth from historically marginalized groups, and by attempting to place articles written by youth in the press and in a number of YPP social

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justice-oriented Internet publications. Although the tendency in the Canadian print media is toward increasing control over editorial content, YPP copy has been published in more than 200 Canadian daily and weekly newspapers and appears regularly in major newspapers such as the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and the Toronto Star. Youth represent roughly 27 percent of the Canadian population, but too often their voices are not registered in the public domain. Youth “as problem” are the focus of a great deal of public debate (i.e., youth violence, crime, drug abuse, education standards, etc.), but ironically these very stakeholders are hardly consulted on issues that directly affect them. The YPP project aims to correct this imbalance (as well as to empower youth, develop literacy skills, and generally provide meaningful experiences for them in a nonpatronizing manner). The reach that these articles have is unequalled by any other similar youth media project. YPP is the only youth/literacy/media project in Canada that operates as a news agency, publishing young writers on a consistent basis in large mainstream newspapers. A non-profit organization based in Toronto, YPP depends on a mix of foundation and government grants for its existence. Gauging youth consciousness is a fickle process at best. Youth is a transitory demographic and is intersected with all of the same identity markers as the population at large with the added contradiction of identities-in-process, the necessary ideational and symbolic “work” that young people undertake in developing a sense of self in relation to others. Now having worked and consulted with YPP over a six-year period, I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds—even thousands—of young people and to see many of them publish articles in the various newspapers to which YPP provides copy and the e-zines it produces. With a wide-open mandate for youth to articulate what is on their minds, certain themes emerge time and time again: body image (self); antiracism (culture and society); media (pop culture); education and jobs (economy); relationships with friends, family, and lovers (others); and—what shouldn’t come as a surprise—a generalized bias toward youth on the part of parents, teachers, government, employers, and the media. In regards to the latter, every good story requires a villain, and this one is no different. Youth feel profoundly misunderstood by older generations, whom they see as anchored to traditions, holier-than-thou, and hogging all the jobs. This story, told in three parts, is one of opening some doors to youth consciousness at the turn of the millennium. Like a cheesy Hollywood yarn, it begins with a problem (how to encourage young people to write), followed by a contradiction ([mis]understandings of young people by [adult] academics), and concludes in a blissful resolution (two years of youth copy in a major daily newspaper). The caveat preemptor is that it incorrectly sets this writer into a position of protagonist, blowing his own horn, as you will. In reality, the accolades appropriately belong with the young writers. From here, we begin. SELLING YOUTH Given a rather open mandate for that first summer’s endeavors, my co-worker and I decided to take a table out onto the streets to try to “sell” writing and youth voice to young people, much like a street merchant hawks goods. Although our goal was to enable “authentic” manifestations of youth voice, we adopted an “impure” critical stance to the project. As we hoped our young writers would do, we attempted to “buy in” but not “sell

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out” to the culture of consumption. First, we reappropriated the traditional sense of “Speaker’s Corner” from its Canadian incarnation as the name of the video booth of Much Music (Canada’s rock video television network). Thus, “Writer’s Corner” was born, a mobile unit with a staff of two that would set up in areas of high-volume pedestrian traffic around Toronto. Second, we organized a contest, “Youth in a Changing World” and set about soliciting corporate sponsors such as Much Music, SONY, and the Gap clothing stores to provide—in the words of one of our judges—some “corporate swag.” Third, we sought the participation of three young, progressive, successful—but “cool”—judges (journalists Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, and University of Toronto Professor Rinaldo Walcott). Fourth, we shamelessly solicited any media attention we could get. Fifth, we negotiated to get a high-profile site for our awards ceremony, the Toronto Star tent at Toronto’s “Word on the Street” literacy festival. And finally, we tried to project some “attitude” when soliciting youth. As with any such project, we hit some road bumps along the way. “Writing” and “youth voice” quite frankly, are hard sells on the streets of Toronto. Certainly, we met our share of extraordinary youth, some of whom were already accomplished writers. We soon learned, however, that the question, “do you write?” or, “what are your thoughts about ‘x’” just do not inspire much interest on busy city streets. Furthermore, because we positioned ourselves on streets where most solicitors were selling actual goods, we were in double jeopardy—suspected as merchants and rejected as literacy advocates. Thus, we adapted our message to fit the hustle and bustle of the streets of a consumer culture where “what do you think about ‘x’?” does not compete well with “how would you like to have an ‘x’?” Eventually, my patter became the following: “Hi. We’re running a writing contest for youth. We have prizes from SONY, the Gap, Much Music, etc.” The trick was to collapse syllables as much as possible so that “prizes” followed a split-second behind “writing.” By commodifying writing, we reduced our practice as editors and educators to the lowest common denominator of the culture of consumption, and we were rewarded for it. Youth would write it (an article) in the hope that they would get it (a prize). Nonetheless, we achieved limited success until we were able to piggyback our message onto the promotional vehicle of consumer culture, the commercial media. Getting media attention for grassroots causes, as activists and community organizers well know, is a hit-and-miss affair involving press releases, phone calls, and desperate pleas and entreaties. After numerous unsuccessful attempts, we were pleasantly surprised when Toronto’s CITY TV/Much Music came calling. A brief feature on a local City TV newscast was repeated to a national audience on Much Music. Most impressive was our appearance on Much Music, bookended by brief features on the rock band Van Halen and the lead singer of U2, Bono. Immediately, our fortunes looked brighter. The YPP office was swamped with calls, and local media (the Toronto Star and Now Magazine, Toronto’s free entertainment weekly) printed contest details. The contest was a great success. The submitted articles were full of insights on the changing conditions of youth in a period of a globalizing economy and culture going global. Much of it has since been published (the two grand-prize winners were published in a feature article several days later in the Toronto Star). Everyone involved in the contest—editors and judges alike—was swayed by the creativity of the narratives and the poignancy of the arguments. When many of the young writers, who as a group

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represented the shifting cultural demographic of Toronto, assembled in the Toronto Star tent at “Word on the Street” for the award ceremony and a series of “Youth Speak Out” readings, the sense of hope in this celebration of youth voice was palpable. Although only the winners got the “corporate swag,” the material goods were outshone by the visible elation of young people seizing the floor, as it were, to have their voices heard. That this outpouring of “authentic” youth expression occurred through the auspices of the culture of consumption seemed not to matter; rather, as I would argue, the “impure” critical stance we adopted from the outset enabled this dialogue. In this case, the “necessary symbolic work” of youth identity formation in the culture of consumption coalesces with the expression of critical youth voice on some of the pressing social and cultural issues of the day. READING YOUTH Generally, people think that teens are trouble. In reality, many youth are capable of being positively involved in society, and making a difference. —Esther Maloney and Julie Benoit, Young People’s Press So I would suggest that the portrayal of my entire generation as wasted space (slackers) is a conscious attempt to keep us down and prevent us from attaining power. —Nicole Demers, Young People’s Press One thing is certain: By not standing up to be counted, you could be a part of that volatile concoction that begins to destroy those around you. And when the flames begin to lick at your own feet, there might not be anybody left to lift you out of the fire. —Sarah Trimble, Young People’s Press

Regardless of the popular characterization of North American youth as consumption-mad slackers, driven more by their need to fulfill their self-and group identities in consumption than to care about their social and environmental conditions, the reality is far more optimistic. If anything, youth coming of age in the information age have access to a broader range of data and opinions about the world than ever before. Examples abound of youth activism, or, at minimum, emergent consciousness, even if some prosocial and pro-environmental attitudes coexist with the same consumerist mentality that is part of the problem to begin with. It is not my intention to paint a romantic picture of an active culture of resistance on the part of youth but to register some warnings of too pessimistic a reading of the cultural impacts of consumption on youth. What is required in this context is a more flexible way of conceiving social change, a more inclusive emancipatory agenda that does not turf the uninitiated out on their ears for

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not living up to prevailing political orthodoxies. For this purpose, I will adopt Andrew Ross’s (1989) term, “impure criticism” (p. 10) to describe an approach that refuses “any high theoretical ground or vantage point” (p. 11) and instead launches itself into the contradictory terrain of everyday life. An impure criticism starts from the premise, familiar to readers of Antonio Gramsci (1971), that “all men [sic] are intellectuals” (p. 9) that people are not mere hostages to a dominant ideology, but that they are knowing and sentient beings who do things for reasons (even if not always for good ones). Impure criticism resists preachy disdain and instead looks for the sites of possibility in seemingly contradictory political worldviews. Paul Willis makes a provocative case for an impure critical perspective on youth consumption practices, proposing that they should be seen as “necessary symbolic work” (Willis 1990). Willis argues that despite the “hidden—selfish, blind, grabbing—hand of the market…commercial cultural commodities are all most people have” (Willis 1990, 26) and that, perhaps ironically, “commerce and consumerism have helped to release a profane explosion of everyday symbolic life and activity” (Willis 1990, 27). In an era when work futures are increasingly uncertain, when the instability of youth self-and group identity formation is exacerbated by a changing global economy, youth are more likely to invest their identities in their consumptive futures. For Willis, “we are all cultural producers in some way and of some kind in our everyday lives” (Willis 1990, 128). That commercial culture makes up much of our symbolic terrain is a fact of our contemporary condition. Nonetheless, buying into the pleasure and desire of consumption practices to some extent does not preclude developing or maintaining a critical perspective toward the culture of consumption and the corporate interests that enable it. In order for educators to speak to these new times, it is of vital importance to learn to listen to voices outside of those that have been traditionally considered authoritative. Although North American youth may not have a collective voice, they do share a common experience—albeit in multiple and hybrid ways—which is the historical moment. It is important to emphasize, as Grossberg does, that “youth is a cultural rather than a biological category” (Grossberg 1992, 176). Just as in language change, where youth are the primary source of innovation, in cultural change, too, youth are a force to be reckoned with. For example, young people born since 1973—the year commonly cited as the watershed between the epoch of contemporary capitalism called Fordism and the new “post-Fordism” (Harvey 1989, 145)—are 30 years old and younger today. In the short term the roughest and rudest awakenings to these “new times” will be experienced by middle-aged workers who are summarily dismissed from long-held jobs in the manufacturing and resource extraction sectors, but the attitudes and actions of young people present the most prescient beacons of what is to come. Writing of youth as a generational category is an enterprise fraught with contradictions, given the historical biases of youth scholarship toward normative projections of white, middle-class, male subject positions; the actual complexity of youth cultures that are marked by class, race, and gender differences or by subcultural practices; and the transitory nature of this stage of life, which can never be more than a temporary condition. Nonetheless, as an historical marker—a synchronic sampling of diverse people and groups who share many of the same changing social, cultural, economic, and technological conditions—the category of youth plays a useful heuristic role.

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Youth, or more precisely the representation(s) of youth, have been at the heart of the electronic media industry since its inception. As Stuart Ewen has documented, youth were seen as the key innovators of social change by the advertisers of the 1920s who set out to win over that generation to the ethos of the culture of consumption (Ewen 1976). Youth were first identified as a “target market” in the post-World War II economic boom. Larry Grossberg argues that despite “sociological differences…and the cultural diversity of its tastes and styles,…this was the first generation isolated by business (and especially by advertising and marketing agencies) as an identifiable market…[and] by 1957…was worth over $30 billion a year” (Grossberg 1992, 173). Families were encouraged to have children in order to produce “more consumers.” A cover of Life magazine in 1958 spelled out this need for new consumers: “Kids: Built in Recession Cure. How 4 million a year make millions in business” (Grossberg 1992, 172). Not only were youth identified as a generational category and a consumer force in the postwar period, but also the representation of youth became central to the media text. Images of vibrant, visually appealing youth have been used to sell virtually every consumer product imaginable, but particularly those that are identified with pleasure (as opposed to drudgery). Dick Hebdige points out that when youth are represented in the media, they tend to be portrayed either as “youth-as-fun” or as “youth-as-trouble” (Hebdige 1988, 19), the former of which is concentrated in the advertising text. Identifying and empowering youth as a consumer force has led to a genie-out-of-thebottle effect: youth are seen as a “market”; the new leisured youth, or, more precisely, those left out of the leisure class demographic, are also a “problem” (Hebdige 1988, 19). Although the representation of youth—particularly youth of color—as a “problem” particularly in the news media, has provoked many a moral panic and has served to focus sociological and journalistic attention on youth, that problem is outside of the parameters of this chapter. Rather, the problem taken up here is that, while youth continue to represent “fun” and pleasure in the advertisement text, and while self- and group identity are increasingly tied up in those interpellations of “youth,” in a changing global economy North American youth straddle a contradictory space. They are contingent consumers, in general one of the most materially blessed generations in human history, but for whom economic decline looms as a real threat as they prepare to enter a shrinking job market. WRITING YOUTH There is no free lunch in this interconnected world. —Jacob Niedzwiecki, Young People’s Press What is needed is to give young people a sense of hope in the future based on learning how they, individually and collectively, have within their reach the power to make a difference. —Shaun Chen, Young People’s Press If you’re trying to lower youth unemployment rates, doesn’t it make sense to get the input of youth? If you’re

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trying to stop the increase of gangs in the city, why not ask young people why they exist? How will anyone know what we need, if we don’t speak up? —Jelani Nias, Young People’s Press We sometimes get caught up in the clichés that “young people are the future” and lose sight that they are also very much the present. —Missy Gould and Eric Majalahti, Young People’s Press

Media by, and for, youth. Such a simple formula; such a tough sell. For cultural workers attempting to create a space for youth opinions and ideas in the mainstream print media, this concept has usually remained elusive, a dream waiting for the right context. Over a nearly two-year period, 1997–1999, YPP had the unusual opportunity to participate in such an experiment when the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily news-paper, provided a space in its now defunct weekly “young street” section (Tuesdays) for copy produced by Young People’s Press. Though the final editorial say rested with the Star, the editor of the award-winning “young street” section, Vivian MacDonald, gave YPP a wide mandate to go into the community to find out what youth were thinking, saying, and doing and to bring the resulting articles into the pages of Canada’s highest-circulation daily. In order to attract not only youth writers, but also youth readers, a balance was struck between social-justice and pop-culture reporting and opinion writing. YPP developed three columns that would anchor a weekly feature and one or more soft news stories. Very Cool was a listings column in which movies, books, CDs, Web sites, writing contests, and youth events ranging from town hall meetings with the police to anti-racism conferences would be publicized. Confidentially Yours was a teen advice column written by and for youth, which enabled young people to “just say know” about issues of sexuality, drugs, and relationships with parents and friends. Youthbeat was a weekly opinion piece that usually combined personal experience and opinion writing. The “young street” experiment opened the door to hundreds of youth from all walks of life to add their “voice” to public discourse on the issues of the day and for other youth to read their views. It is a model for youth journalism and a window into youth consciousness in the closing years of the twentieth century. Over this 22-month period, YPP published 297 articles written by youth in the “young street” section; this in addition to the weekly Very Cool and Confidentially Yours columns. Youth came into the process with a direct sense of purpose, to be published and to let their voice be heard. Herein lies the key to motivating youth to write without bribes of corporate swag: given a broad audience, youth were mightily motivated to put pen to paper. It is difficult to quantify the results of public education, but the “young street” experiment exposed literally millions of readers to youth views, and hundreds of youth were empowered to use newly developed literacy skills to actively participate in the discourses of the public sphere. With a paid weekday subscription rate of more than 454,000, the Toronto Star has a reach of well over one million readers per day. Youth

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who had never dreamed they could publish a piece of writing in a major Canadian newspaper have done so, and many have become empowered to pursue a life of writing. In order to make the representation of youth “voice” as inclusive as possible, tremendous effort was put into reaching out to racialized minority, Aboriginal, street, and LGBT youth. Most significant was the participation of youth representing Canada’s racial and cultural diversity. A full 47 percent of the bylines were of racialized minority and Aboriginal youth. (For a broad sampling of this copy, see www.equalitytoday.org.) While Canada’s news media is attempting to increase its diversity, a study of forty-one newsrooms of daily newspapers commissioned by the Canadian Newspaper Association in 1994 revealed that only 2.6 percent of the staff were of racialized minority or Aboriginal background. YPP’s achievements in this realm were to an extent a result of focused outreach, but they also demonstrate that young people are ready for social change: when given the chance to rock the status quo, they will take the opportunity. Many of the articles went far beyond simple platitudes of cross-cultural celebration; recurring themes included cultural hybridity, histories of race relations, and contradictions at the heart of Canadian multiculturalism. One series of articles that stands out in particular was a set of four day-in-the-life pieces—two by black Canadians and two by Aboriginal youth—that brought readers into the everyday lives of the young writers and featured the use of slang and vernacular common to these cultural groups. To honor these articles, YPP received Awards of Distinction from both the Harmony Movement (2000) and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (2001). Although YPP relies on senior editors who play both an editorial and an educational role, the broad decisions in regards to editorial content—what counts as “news” and how youth are represented within it—are most often made by the youth participants. The concerns mobilized in the project are essentially those of the young writers, although experienced facilitators are in place to enable the work to reach its potential (in this case, publication in major newspapers). To fulfill this objective, YPP has developed alternative pedagogies in the area of language and literacy education. Drawing on the principles of rhetoric and composition theory, popular education techniques, critical media theory, and the basic tenets of news writing, these workshops provide youth with an alternative view of the writing process, one that empowers them to use literacy as a tool that can enact change in their lives. This innovative approach to writing pedagogy has had an impact on young writers, a significant number of whom came into the process feeling that they lacked the requisite skills. To break down the fear of failure, inculcated by many years of red ink and report cards, requires, in part, a “deschooling” of youth literacy practices. The editors at YPP are aware of the need to teach writing as a communicative practice, to not teach writing as a set of rules that set up failure but to empower young people to view writing as a simple extension of human communication. The primary innovation used by YPP is the emphasis on writing as storytelling, a form of com-munication basic to human cultures across history and geography. In YPP workshops, youth are empowered to recognize their capacity as storytellers, to first emphasize what they wish to communicate and then to work out how they will do it. This approach recognizes the writing process as defined by Aristotle and demonstrates the resiliency of oral narrative in our literate—or post-literate—times. It emphasizes invention (the idea) and arrangement (how to structure that idea), as well as style (grammar, usage, etc.). By recognizing the importance of invention for storytelling and news writing, young writers are empowered

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to recognize the value of what they have to say before being taught how to do so. This approach valorizes youth “voice” over writing competency. Unlike many school writing exercises, the strength of a piece is in what it has to say, not how it is composed. The key is motivation, inspiring young learners to go the extra distance when confronted with the more constrained aspects of arrangement—specifically in relation to journalistic practices—and style. Typically, a young writer will learn about YPP at a workshop, online, or from one of the many newspapers in which YPP publishes. The most effective way to attract new writers, however, is to combine it with the pedagogy of consumption in the form of a writing contest with cash or “swag” prizes. Regardless of how thin the prospect of winning may be, this added value appears to motivate many young people to make the effort to sit down and write. On the other hand, street and otherwise marginalized youth are less likely to participate in a contest because they are often cut off from the circulation of the contest details and lack the material conditions of a quiet table and a mailing address. These youth, for whom the liturgy of the culture of consumption—the store windows, the billboards, and the swagger of shoppers—is a constant reminder of their outsider status, can be attracted to a workshop if bus tokens, pizza, and juice are offered. Thus, it is important to cater to two sides of the consumption coin: the fetish of commodities and the survival need to consume the basics of life. And in order not to privilege only the middle-class kids with modems, handwritten copy is accepted from marginalized youth. A YPP editor sprinkles numbered questions throughout the text, and the piece is returned to the writer who needs only to answer the questions rather than rewrite the whole document by hand. The YPP experiment continues today. Its flagship Web site—www.ypp.net—is a publishing hub, and copy continues to be provided to newspapers across North America (Scripps Howard News Service provides YPP copy, free-of-charge, to more than 300 newspapers across the United States). The Toronto Star still publishes a weekly YPP column and the occasional YPP story. The youth section, “young street” has been mothballed, replaced by a cooler-than-cool, hyper-than-hype section for young adults called “Boom!” And the newspaper has developed a new section for “tweens” (9- to 13year-olds) called “Brand New Planet.” When YPP’s free reign at the Star ended, we were informed that the copy was not up to journalistic standards. This claim flies in the face of reader response and audience studies that show how readers bring varying expectations to differing reading contexts. It also insults the many young writers who had written tremendous stories and ignores the fact that YPP was providing almost twice as much content as usual in the two months leading up to the change. More significant, however, it disguises a differing vision for what counts as youth copy. YPP’s final “young street” cover prior to the change was a politicized, critical feature story on HIV/AIDS education and support programs within Toronto’s racialized minority community. The following week’s “youth” or YPP feature was an adult staff writer’s piece on the relative legitimacy of unauthorized Pokemon cards for young people. Since the dismissal of youth YPP articles in the Star, the paper has offered a meandering array of articles pitched across an age spectrum of 9 to 35, a wandering section in search of a demographic, written mainly by Toronto Star staff writers. Youth lose again. Word!

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REFERENCES Ewen, Stuart. 1976. Captains of consciousness: Advertising and the social roots of the consumer culture. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffery Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Grossberg, Larry. 1992. We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hebdige, Dick. 1988. Hiding in the light. London: Routledge. Ross, Andrew. 1989. No respect: Intellectuals and popular culture. New York: Routledge. Willis, Paul. 1990. Common culture: Symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Young People’s Press. 1996–2002. Youth submissions. Toronto: Author.

7 TAKE TWO ON MEDIA AND RACE David Stovall The school cannot be absent of the struggle. —Paulo Freire

Teacher educators often engage their students, pre-service teachers, with a rhetoric of public school teaching as an “empowering” practice that provides young people with the ability to change their realities. Unfortunately, the common occurrence in colleges of education is that the professors who deliver these messages to pre-service teachers are tremendously removed from the lives of young people. As a recently hired professor in a college of education at a large university in the U.S. Mid-west, I had to come to grips with this fact when I reviewed texts to use for my educational foundations classes. Educational foundations courses, tenaciously placed in pre-service teacher education programs, are usually courses designed to explore the history and philosophy of education. As an instructor, I found many of the accounts in the standard foundations texts to be dull, uninvolved, and overtly sanitized. Some were better than others, as they highlighted the political economy of schooling and the racialized context of education, but these were in the minority. In the end, I was challenged with the question: how do I communicate the messy, contradictory, conflicting, and fulfilling realities of teaching while providing a context for myself and the university students in the course? The answer came in two parts. First, I had to get a new set of readings that embraced the radical tradition of uncovering the overlooked history of education. I gathered texts and articles that engaged histories of oppression and resistance by authors such as Howard Zinn, Paulo Freire, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Joel Spring, James Anderson, Lois Weiss, Joyce King, and James Loewen. I decided that it was important to bring my graduate “learning” experiences to the world of undergraduates that I taught in a college of education. I believed that leaving the critical readings until graduate school, a common occurrence in my experiences with undergraduate teacher education students, was “too late in the game,” because many folks who teach in K-12 classrooms do not get the opportunity to go to graduate school. I thought that if participants in a teacher education program received exposure to more radical educational philosophies (bell hooks, Howard Zinn, etc.) early in their undergraduate experience, the more support they would possess to pursue critical thoughts and actions. As innovative perspectives on seemingly “old” educational issues are so desperately needed, there should be a concerted effort by all who work with pre-service teachers, particularly undergraduates, to foster environments that support radical thinking outside of traditional educational paradigms. Second, I believed that in order to continue to be relevant in my university teaching of pre-service teachers, I must participate in an activity that afforded such context. Simply put, I had to remain engaged in the lives of youth and in a high school classroom.

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Working with youth in high school would inform my university teaching, and inversely I would be able to bring concepts and readings from my university courses to engage high school students. In print it may sound easy, but the process was indeed challenging, as I worked with high school students in addition to working to fulfill the requirements of a tenure-track position. Many of my colleagues would argue that I was committing academic suicide; at the research university where I teach, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the core requirement of a professor on a tenure track is to engage in research that can be published in peer-reviewed journals. In colleges of education, many faculty members understand this requirement to mean that “teaching” is secondary labor and all attempts at entertaining community-based work for social change should come after receiving tenure. Engaging in a community-based educational project that actively seeks to work toward justice is viewed as getting critical “too early” in the game. Nevertheless, the following is my account of my attempt to operate in both contexts while remaining employed. CROSSING BOUNDARIES: WHY ENGAGE? Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the everyday work of being a university professor is similar to many other white-collar professions: I do lots of paperwork and I negotiate office politics and juggle the quasi-social-quasi-required fraternizing of people who work in the same place. I have to be painfully honest with myself that many aspects of academia are similar to any other “gig” but one perk is the assumed freedom of schedule. Then again, with this proposed freedom of schedule I often find myself having meetings about when the next meeting will be. With community work and academic responsibilities, time is often not my own. Combine this with working with a group of high school seniors, and my hands were reasonably full. As a professor in an academic department, I also enjoy the privilege of accessing “theory,” which influences the work I engage in with young people. As an activist who works for justice in many spheres, I believe that the combination of theory and practice creates a space for engaged practice that can be enhanced and critiqued perpetually through reflection and evaluation. Nevertheless, in my experiences, many schools of education reject this praxis-oriented ideology. Words like “reflection,” which I argue can be sustained, politicized, and rendered meaningful, frequently resonate in college of education as “kumba-ya” or sing-songy approaches that don’t improve the assumed “bottom line” of student performance. Evaluation becomes the sole quantifiable measure associated with test performance. Many colleges of education exist most comfortably as compartmentalized fiefdoms, rejecting interdisciplinary approaches or collaborations to engage the contested and political spaces of education (hooks 1994). As federal and state educational policies in the United States become more arcane in function (e.g., school vouchers debate, etc.), those who profess their concern for social justice find themselves at a crossroads of sorts. Unfortunately, conservative educational policy interprets engaging the lives of young people as an outcome-based endeavor that regulates the life chances of young people through a scantron sheet. Instead of having “no child left behind,” many children are left in the rear to fend for themselves. Those who find the aforementioned policies counterproductive must struggle in a process that names the

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dysfunctional nature of current policies while creating critical and productive spaces for young people to engage their lives. Such practice of resistance is participatory in that students and teachers are engaged in producing thoughts and actions that address vibrant and pressing contemporary issues. Coupled with placing this resistance in a historical context, the project of education that I struggle to achieve in my university (and high school) teaching can result in dialogues that push all parties involved to challenge commonly shared assumptions on “how things should be.” Understanding that this is not the case in the vast majority of urban public schools, I set out to participate in an example of a youth educa-tion project, supported by the public school system, that espouses an ideological vision that is seemingly counter to the current test-centered status quo. As a faculty member at an urban public university who would double as a part-time high school social studies teacher, my hope was to engage theory from an experiential/participatory standpoint, to develop relevance for myself as a university based pre-service teacher educator, and to pose, I hoped, for my university (and high school students) as a viable option to the typical public school educator. Instead of engaging the “liberal rhetoric” of helping the downtrodden, my idea was to “get my hands dirty,” understanding it as the most viable way for me to make sense of what I’m supposed to be doing as a teacher educator. Many would argue that my particular position in the high school was still one of an outsider. In terms of my employment, this argument may appear to be more salient. In recognizing the racialized contexts of education, however, I understand that at any given moment the realities of the young people I work with have been and could be my own. As an African American male, my experiences have taught me that my current position is the combination of choice and circumstance. At any moment during my youth I could have been suspected of a crime, deemed unruly in a classroom, or improperly placed in a program that could have stifled more than my learning capacity. Knowledge of this fact returns me to a statement I share with my close comrades: “a Ph.D. will not save you from oppression.” It may give you the illusion of using the accouterments that come with the occupation, but as a person of color you are far from the first-class citizen you may have fooled yourself into believing you are. A terminal academic degree alone will not equip you with the skill set to critically asses and actively engage the world you live in. Acquiring a graduate degree and developing some of the intellectual skills and abilities through this education can assist, but formal education should never be understood as the sole asset required to engage in community-based initiatives that work toward justice. Similar to texts or articles, a degree is best used as a reference and for access to resources. From here, my option was to engage a process that refutes the claim of “Ph.D. equals privilege for all,” while placing the issues and concerns of young people at the forefront of the argument. CORP: CITY AS A CLASSROOM To get access to youth, I looked to the community organizations and social justice educators I worked with in the K–12 Chicago school system. Fortunately, my experience in community organizations and school groups in the past twelve years in the Chicago area had placed me in con-tact with many individuals and collectives that work for

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economic, social, and political justice. They had been influential in helping me to develop a critical analysis and to incur the necessary knowledge about myself and the communities in which I work. In addition to going to high school and college with many of the organizers, over the years I had developed a rapport with them that made me welcomed in their spaces. To them, I was not a professor requesting to use their community organizational work as the research site for my next book or article. Instead, I was another community member who happened to work at a university, absent of the ulterior “research” motive frequently possessed by academics who travel into community spaces. One particular affiliation I have is with a colleague who works in a center called the Small Schools Workshop that promotes the development of smaller school communities to encourage more young people to participate in their own learning. Small school communities are typically created from breaking larger institutions into smaller units to create new schools in neighborhoods that have historically been underserved by the public education system. By facilitating workshops on race and power at the Small Schools Workshop from 2000 to 2002, I encountered educators from across the country. Through these workshops, I was reintroduced to a woman, new to the Chicago area, who was in the process of developing a program with a unique idea. Years ago, I had participated in a student exchange program with her and a group of high school students from the Bay Area in California and from Chicago, where I taught high school students a class on power and privilege. Over the years we had kept in contact, keeping each other informed on the work we were doing. In the fall of 2002, she introduced me to her innovative idea for high school seniors in Chicago. The program was called CORP: Using the City as a Classroom. Initially I thought CORP was an acronym of sorts, but the director told me that it was her way of emphasizing how using the city as a classroom would develop the group of students into a “corps” to work collectively in their observations and practice. As a guiding premise, the idea was to have young people “question, explore and respond to the world in which they live by participating in the creative opportunities to wrestle with the tangled complexities of self, other and difference” (www.isacs.org/about/news/detail.aap?newsid=39483). Designed for the last semester of high school, the director’s idea was to create a program in which students travel around the city, take classes in nontraditional spaces (e.g., health clinics, public defenders’ offices, etc.), participate in workshops, and create community presentations that highlight their discoveries and critical assessments. I served as an instructor/facilitator in the CORP program in the spring of 2003. The participants were drawn from two different Chicago communities. One was the entire senior class at a “Small Schools” charter school on the south side of Chicago. The twenty-four students from this south side school were predominantly African American and Latino/a, with two white students. The other group, composed of two white students and one African American, was from a private school on the north side of Chicago. The south side school was in an economically shifting neighborhood, where low-income families were leaving due to lack of affordable housing, and the north side school was located in a highly affluent neighborhood that bordered Lake Michigan. Many of the north side students resided in this area while students from the south side school came from various neighborhoods in Chicago. The class background of the group was a substantial mix of students from low-income to highly affluent families. The range of

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experiences contributed to intense discussions on the intersection of race and class in the city. The director’s vision was for both groups to observe and engage with myriad experiences in Chicago and to develop and articulate their own understandings about the intersections of race, power, and class in the city. The process involved a substantial amount of work independent of the classroom. Students were required to create community presentations for parents and at-large members of their neighborhoods. To me, the idea sounded wonderful. What an incredible way to engage young people in a space external to the school and to engage them in a learning activity related to the core curriculum every day! To me, it was the ultimate in developing a relevant learning context. Many teachers talk about the need to get students out of the classroom for other learning experiences, but few have the leeway to do it. I couldn’t have asked for a better space to engage young people. It appeared to me to be the epitome of “experiential learning.” Still, despite my personal buy-in to the idea and the philosophy behind it, I figured it would be a tough sell to school administrators and parents. To my surprise, the administrators at both schools were enthusiastic about the project, almost rivaling the excitement of the students. The parents, however, were another story. Telling parents that their children would be taken out of the traditional classroom for the entire second semester of their senior year, that the school day would start at 10 a.m., and that the curriculum would engage the students with considerable independent work didn’t go over well. Teachers and researchers, for good reason, are often not trusted by communities of color. Many times both groups promise one thing and fall short of delivering what was intended, or these “professionals” do active harm to communities of color. We were met with similar skepti-cism. Some parents thought the program was irresponsible and not geared to prepare their children for “the real world.” In response, the director explained how the program was geared to enhance students’ abilities to process the duties and responsibilities they would have on entering college or the workforce. After hearing the guiding principles of the program, some parents voiced their support for the administrators due to the continued support the latter had showed for their children in the small charter and private schools that participated in this project. Many of these students were from immigrant or low-income families who were shunned and treated poorly by the school system, and these parents were clearly pleased to find the small school to be a space that supported the education of their children. Other students experienced severe difficulties in larger schools and excelled in the environment of a small school. After a series of conversations in light of the aforementioned facts, many parents began to shift in their opinions. If the administrators felt it could work, they would support it. Consequently, after a series of meetings, the program was scheduled to begin in February 2003. To develop our understanding of community involvement, it became crucial for the teachers and researchers involved in this project to humble themselves. While some assume expertise due to advanced degrees, this expertise often does not lend itself to any guarantee for proficiency in terms of the lives of the people they work with. Listening becomes crucial in developing a common ground and placing community needs and concerns as the focal point. In this case, the community concern was quality education for their children. In meeting this need, the program director and I were required to humble ourselves and see our project through the eyes of the parents and the community, while

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hearing and listening, and then developing a process that would enable us to demonstrate accountability, in their terms, to the communities with whom we would work. My responsibility was to teach a class that examined the intersections of race and power. I was teamed with a group of instructors ranging from high school math teachers to local Chicago poets. Funded by a number of local non-profit organizations and with resources from the two Chicago schools, our class titles didn’t fit the “normal” fare in terms of a high school curricula. Instead of a world studies class, the CORP class was called “Fear of a Black Planet.” English/language arts became “Poetics to Prose: Reading and Writing in Chicago.” My social studies class became “Race, Class, Media, and Chicago.” And our charge was to create a set of courses that were not only reminiscent of what they would be taking the next year in college, but to center them in a discourse of the intersections of race and power in the city. The courses fit into a ten-week schedule, ending in April 2003. Discussed in detail later in this chapter, the idea was to develop the classroom as a space where young people could engage as media “experts” an area in which they had a great deal of familiarity. Students from both schools were in unique situations. Because the north side school was private and affluent, all the students were slated for college entrance. The south side school, also a small school, had students from various socioeconomic backgrounds. Despite having troubles in earlier schools, the entire senior class of twenty-four students had been admitted to four-year colleges or universities. The school has no “tracking” system but has as its philosophy preparing students for college or whatever career path they choose. Their school counselor worked diligently in one-on-one meetings with students to discover their interests and to help the students explore possible roads to pursue these interests. Many of the students wouldn’t be considered “successful” in terms of test scores, but, because they had demonstrated effort and improvement, the counselor worked with them to map out possible career paths. I thought that teaching this group would be a challenge for me; I believed that second-semester seniors would have no interests whatsoever, since they had already been accepted to a undergraduate program at a college or a university. To my advantage, however, the program was designed to prepare students for what was in store in the coming fall semester, and so participants remained interested in the course. Students, many of whom would be the first in their family to go to university, were deeply curious about what this new educational experience would be like; as a person they could identity with (racially, geographically, culturally), I functioned as a knowledge source about “university.” Students constantly grilled me with questions about what next year would be like for them, in addition to questions on course content. The CORP program and my class ran in the spring of 2003. It has been my experience that the most challenging yet most productive spaces have been with groups that operate collectively. I argue these spaces are the most challenging because collective leadership and decision making are painstaking processes. Developing consensus with fifteen to thirty people isn’t always orderly or expedient. It becomes especially difficult if factions of the group are diametrically opposed to a suggestion and hold deep investments in their way of looking at and responding to sociocultural issues. It is the most powerful, however, because everyone is provided the opportunity to engage their sense of agency when decisions have to be made. Coupled with accountability, the ability to pose an innovative process becomes plausible. In this case, accountability is simply understood as

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one’s personal and collective responsibility to thoughts and actions. Because young people are unfairly criticized for their assumed beliefs and actions, the process of demonstrating a responsibility to themselves requires a concerted effort from all involved. The following pages are an attempt to report such praxis. CONTEXT AND CURRICULUM: WHY RACE AND THE MEDIA? Operating from the concept of relevance as central to the educational context, I decided to develop a course on race and the media for high school students, “Race, Class, Media, and Chicago.” The idea was to develop a space for young people to critically engage their world through a medium with which they had intimate familiarity. For the purpose of the course, “media” was loosely defined as the electronic, radio transmitted, or printed messages that inform our lives, through either entertainment or journalistic ventures. This gave us numerous opportunities to engage the various contexts of media and their influences. From here, we engaged the social context of music videos, network television, cable corporate entities, documentary films, and various print media. This “curriculum” wasn’t a far stretch from the material I discuss in my university educational foundations classes. What made the opportunity unique was the ability to teach in an interdependent program that provided a set of reflections from both the students and the instructors. Similar to the “culturally relevant pedagogy” championed by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994), our premise was to “unpack” media to discover the various underpinnings that affect our lives. Instead of beginning with dense theoretical concepts and then providing examples, the concrete examples came first, and theory was used as secondary reinforcement. Our idea was to develop a “living deconstruction” of the subject matter, placing students’ lives at the center. Rarely are young people credited with being experts on their lives. Although they may not articulate their expertise in the same manner as adults, a meticulous understanding is revealed if given the proper arena. Through my varied community work, I know that youth often have a clear understanding of what happens in their daily realities, and yet I frequently see adults (often in schools and other institutions) dismiss the students’ knowledge bases and experiences and dismiss them as “childish” or “immature.” By paying close attention, however, youth themselves provide a gateway of material, experiences, and expertise to render curricula relevant. Admittedly, I harshly critique some aspects of youth culture, but I have to remind myself of how youth culture does not occur in a vacuum. “Youth culture” is a fraught ideological terrain. Young people are unconscious foot soldiers in the long front of modernity, involuntary and disoriented conscripts in battles never explained. In particular subordinate and working-class students are rendered by state mandated education into the compulsory living materials of future imaginings and molding. (Willis 2003, 290) Willis suggests that youth actively and unconsciously produce youth identities and practices that are compatible with dominant, dynamic, ideological structures (capitalism, white supremacy, etc.), while I argue that youth resistance is possible and dialogue can

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promote additional youth resistance. The things I enjoyed as a young person were often rejected (e.g., house music, early hip-hop, styles of dress, vernacular, etc). At the same time, however, a small adult population did support my viewpoints as different perspectives. This confirmation encouraged my learning, inside and outside school. With this in mind, a critical element of the class became student and instructor dialogue. At these moments we were able to exchange our views and beliefs, sometimes agreeing to disagree. Like all human interactions, some are better and more productive than others. The ability of our group to engage on such a level promoted a sense of ownership. To bring theory to action, the idea was to “wrestle” with the realities of media, using a series of questions Ladson-Billings reports in an interview with Carlos Alberto Torres: Do you believe children are smart? Do you believe they can learn something? Do you believe there’s some value in what they bring to the learning situation and do you believe it’s important for them to develop a language of critique, so that we don’t keep reproducing what we have? A critical piece is understanding, number one, that the system is not fair. It is not meritocratic. These teachers’ understandings of themselves as political beings becomes instrumental. (Torres 1998) Developing and engaging in a “living deconstruction” became my task as the instructor because I believed that youth need to practice this skill. A premise in my classes is to take nothing at face value. If we talk about it, and you don’t agree or you want to find out more, all is fair game. As instructor I got more from facilitating discussions than leading lectures. Lectures become too didactic, stifling dialogue. To create a space where ideas could be explored, it was important for me to step away from leading the discussion, to challenge students on their own understandings. The advantage lies in the selection of the focus for the course. In an area as broad as media, we were able to develop multiple contexts by which to analyze and engage. Instead of a text, I developed a course packet with works by Ellis Chismore (1997), bell hooks (1994), and Greg Dimitrardis (2002). Again, because text was more the reference than a focal point, dialogue became key to the course. The teaching philosophy I attempted to adopt with this group was embedded in a statement given to me by a community organizer. He constantly reminded me that I needed to be able to “see and hear” people if I was going to be serious about both teaching and learning. The process was one that combined experience and supported it with reference. Another organizer, who also taught, reminded me that “there was no substitute for study.” His idea was that the school be political, complex, and often confrontational. As a teacher, one must understand that one cannot be the lone savior of the world. Again, he told me that, if I was serious, then I would engage the process of learning collectively, with students and other faculty who hold the same ideology. The group may be small, but it will be necessary to understand who you are and what you’re trying to do. Upon entering academia, I remembered this and tried to take it to every class, whether in community organizations, high schools, or the university.

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FROM FRED HAMPTON TO OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM: DIALOGUES Again, the rhetoric still sounds nice, but it’s a different situation when you get a class of seniors in their last semester and everyone in the class has been accepted to college. I thought that my course had better be interesting. We started with the definition of “media,” and I let them know that all forms of entertainment could be discussed in the class. I got some index cards and asked them to write down what they expected from the class. Some wanted to enhance their understandings of race and culture. Others wanted to know why everything is “relevant.” A few had no expectations at all. The first conversation was on race and the media in Chicago. I was by myself, and the class took place in a room at the university where I teach. We tried to engage with the nature of image versus reality. The first chal-lenge was to deconstruct the concept of “keeping it real.” Some of the students explained that it was not being “fake.” I asked them to give me an example of what “fake” was, and students suggested that it was being something that they’re not. I asked them if they could give me a media example. They talked about current rap videos that displayed scantily clad women and men excessively draped in jewelry. Moving into larger contexts of the media, we discussed the companies that make the decisions as to which images get transmitted that they understood as “fake.” In our first class we engaged important questions about the media’s active manipulations of the “real” verisimilitude, curricula I also addressed in my university classrooms. For the remainder of the course, we delved into the various contexts of control, using media examples from Chicago and additional national and international sources. The curriculum focus I constructed with the class relates to a point Cornell West raises: that “we must not ignore the consequence when images are manipulated to appear ‘different’ while reinforcing stereotypes and oppressive structures of domination” (Haymes 1995). In another part of the course, we examined the corporate structure of media and the nature of conglomerates. The conglomerate discussion led us into how a small number of media corporations (e.g., Time-Warner, Disney Cap Cities, Westinghouse, General Electric, and the like) control the majority of the stations we watch on television, the movies we frequent, and the radio we listen to. We began a discussion on why we enjoy particular television shows, whether or not it’s important that many of the people who write popular TV shows write from preconceived notions, and the fact that representations of “race” and difference on TV shows frequently and actively reproduce stereotypes. At first, it didn’t matter to the majority of the class, but our discussion became heated when we watched the Marlon Riggs film on the history of African American stereotypes in entertainment, Ethnic Notions. Some student thought Riggs’s film was slow moving, but others began to dissect the phenomenon of “Bert Williams” and placed it in the context of current media. After these discussions, our work branched into the nature of diversity and multiculturalism. When asked about “diversity,” many students felt that it meant putting people from different backgrounds in the same place to perform a particular task. They talked about how groups had been historically excluded and how diversity was a way to include these groups. Employment and education were the largest examples, as some students had visited colleges and talked to “diversity” counselors or had visited the “offices of diversity” at their future schools.

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When we analyzed the major television networks and the top-rated shows for the season, however, very few contained “diverse” populations. The opportunity to engage with our daily lived experiences of race provided some with a new take on how media does not reflect the lives we live. As the class moved forward, I had to be very careful about promoting the negative uses of media. Local news broadcasts and music video programs were the primary targets of student critiques. Students would come to my office and talk about how they weren’t into television anymore and had begun to turn it off. I thought this was a good thing, but I knew the most important piece was for students to make their own decisions. My suggestions were only reference points. The hope was to have students engage the subject matter and deliver their own reflections. Although many of the current media outlets are not beneficial to informing the public of different views and opinions, it remains important to provide access to alternative media. They may be small in number, but it became critical in our class to investigate the various outlets that run opposite the mainstream media. Operating from this premise gave us one of the most heated conversations of the ten-week session. After watching a segment of the documentary Eyes on the Prize on slain Black Panther member Fred Hampton, we began a dialogue on gangs in Chicago. As a community organizer in the late 1960s, Chairman Hampton had the ability to organize scores of former gang members into recreational leagues and community workers. To many, it sounded amazing, but it provided us the opportunity to investigate what is often omitted from local news reports. We began to talk about how the local news is often inaccurate and seems to pick the most inarticulate person to give an eyewitness account on camera. The conversations in class transitioned to how this can be confused as the norm in reference to communities of color. Here we contrasted the televising of crime with crime statistics. Students began to include the power of television in terms of reinforcing stereotypes. As the conversation returned to Hampton and the counterintelligence program of the FBI known as COINTELPRO,1 we transitioned our conversation to the war in Iraq that started in 2003. This provided us the chance to map the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Our conversation bordered on the nature of the colonial state and how many nations in the Middle East remain critical of the former colonial powers that continue to export their natural resources. One student led the class based on his gathering of alternative news sources on Iraq. Many of the class members began to ask about the nature of economic sanctions and how they work. Students did research and discovered that before the war began, the United States had invoked policies that made it illegal to export certain items for water filtration, as the U.S. government argued that the components doubled for weapons’ manufacturing. Consequently, the Iraqi government would have a water filtration system that would be missing a pump needed to power the machines. Because the pump was one of the targeted components under the sanctions policy, many Iraqi communities wouldn’t have the proper water treatments and began to contract water-borne diseases like cholera and typhoid. Transitioning from the Black Panther Party to Chicago street gangs to counterintelligence to the war in Iraq (Operation Enduring Freedom) led to an intense session. Media became the thread to intertwine everything in order to unpack our relationships to the various events. We began to discuss what we knew that did not get into the popular press and how historical examples showed how such information was actively suppressed. This historical knowledge was then brought into contemporary

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contexts, and the students began to dialogue on how media constructs our realities. Opinions expressed by students ranged from conspiracy theories to remaining loyal to the government to the critical nature of researching. Many of the students of color and the white students began to contrast their experiences, but they also discovered a common thread, as both groups had experienced the omission or misrepresentation of historical and local events from popular news and media production outlets. Many African American and Latino/a students cited the absence of any reporting or representation in local media reports of the police brutality against people of color in their neighborhoods, and others used historical events like Japanese internment during World War II and the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Although tiring at times, these moments offered an example of how young people take their ideas and move forward. BACK TO LIFE: JUXTAPOSITIONS AND REFLECTIONS Despite the powerful session reported in the previous section, in order to improve our skills as active learners (both teacher and students), critical reflection is crucial. Although the project met my political and philosophical vision of an engaged high school curriculum (Kecht 1992; Kelly 1995), the program had glitches. Some days were better than others, and there were moments where my course seemed to stumble forward due to my own lack of planning or our collective disinterest in the subject matter for the day. Despite their eagerness demonstrated in their participation, students were often late and had the excuses that run with being late (bad public transportation, loss of time, etc.). Our final community project wasn’t given the same attention as our classes, and many of the students expressed their dismay accordingly. At the university level, many of my colleagues thought this work was just another academic research project. Because I had a course release at the university, I was able to use the time I would traditionally use for my college course to teach the media class. Instead of frowning on the venture, many university colleagues problematically minimized the course as “cute” or some part of my community service component. They would see young people in the building and always tell me how “nice” it was for me to bring high school students to the college to take courses. Although the youth impacted on my university teaching, I was not able to create a presence or a relevance for my colleagues. In the attempt to engage the Ladson-Billings triumvirate of culturally relevant pedagogy (academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical critique), I believe my course leaned heavily on the latter (Torres 1998, 196). Not necessarily a bad thing, but I recognize that, in order for programs like CORPS to remain, teachers, facilitators, and directors need to be prepared for possible assessments by central educational bureaucracies. The challenge will be to keep students at the center through dialogue, collective activities, and student evaluation. Current mainstream educational policy does not support programs like CORPS. State, local, and federal educational institutions are focused on outcome-based models, with results demonstrated in test-score performance. Programs like CORPS that focus on the development of critical analysis run opposite of the aforementioned. In the process of maintaining and improving the work, it will be important to demonstrate the necessity of such a program. The community forums can prove to be a crucial context. The idea of reporting back to the

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larger community could garner support for the program. Accountability remains central; if students demonstrate what they have learned from the community back to the community and place this learning in the context of formal schooling, this could reinforce support for the institution. Here, if the worst-case scenario occurs and the program is downsized or removed, members of the community might be motivated to provide the various resources needed to keep the program afloat. The idea here is not to put on a dog and pony show for potential funding sources but to demonstrate accountability through updates and forums that reflect the community’s support. As a teacher/facilitator/learner, I may have endangered students’ well-being during certain moments in the class. Intense conversations about local and federal governments are taken very seriously in this post-September 11, 2001, political climate. Students and teachers have been persecuted for expressing opinions in classrooms that are deemed disloyal or seditious. In 2002 and 2003, federal policies in the USA PATRIOT Act, designed to curtail civil liberties closely monitor any activity deemed suspect in regard to national security (Sarasohn 2003; Sen 2003). Nonsanctioned critiques of the government could place me on the “suspect” list. Developing such critique can be even more dangerous in communities of color. Current attacks on Arab communities serve as blatant reminders to the extent of such risk. Many students of color in both my university classes and the high school class often discuss how the violence and the constant state surveillance in Arab communities after September 11, 2001, occurred continually in African American and Latino/a communities prior to (and continue to occur after) September 11, 2001. Unwarranted search and seizures, unsanctioned police raids and unlawful arrests made on “suspicion” are daily episodes in many urban communities. As an African American male teacher, I am also “at risk.” In many ways my curricular and pedagogical moves in my high school class could feed the stereotype of the “angry black male” with a vendetta against the government. I am a teacher “wrongly” influencing the minds of youth to critically assess the actions of their government. If spun correctly, media outlets and conservatives could increase negative sentiment toward CORPS, possibly scaring parents and administrators from the program. In this case, risk, although ever present, should be calculated with the idea that the act of teaching is never solely about the teacher. It becomes irresponsible to risk young people for personal agendas. However, I cannot dismiss myself or the students as political beings. This especially informs my college courses, because the pre-service teachers I work with are close to having the responsibility of navigating the aforementioned spaces. They will have to make the decisions as to how they will structure their classes and how they will engage with the institutions they encounter. I work to stay relevant in high school spaces because I want to pose options for those who feel there may be another way to engage young people beyond the status quo of highstakes testing. This high school work continually serves as a reminder that teaching is never neutral. As teachers we must be prepared to engage a messy process that is low on accolades and public recognition. In the end, however, if we are serious about the lives of young people and our own, we will continue to challenge, create, and discover new ways to change our condition.

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NOTE 1. For more information on COINTELPRO, see Ward Churchill and James Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

REFERENCES Allen, J. 1999. Class actions: Teaching for social justice in elementary and middle school. New York: Teachers College Press. Castenell, L.A. and W.Pinar, eds. 1993. Understanding curriculum as racial text: Representations of identity and difference in education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Haymes, S.N. 1995. Race, culture and the city. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hidalgo, N., C.McDowell, and E.V.Sidell, eds. 1990. Facing racism in education. Boston: Harvard University Press. www.isacs.org Kecht, M.R. 1992. Pedagogy as politics: Literary theory and critical teaching. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,. Kelly, E.A. 1995. Education, democracy and public knowledge. San Francisco: Westview Press. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 1997. The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African-American children. New York: Jossey-Bass. Macedo, D., and L.Bartolome. 2001. Dancing with bigotry: Beyond the politics of tolerance. New York: St. Martins Press. Sarasohn, David. 2003. Patriots vs. the PATRIOT Act. The Nation (22 September): 23. Sen, Rinku. 2003. Every move you make. Colorlines (fall): 16–17. Torres, Carlos Alberto. 1998. Education, power, and personal biography: Dialogues with critical educators. New York: Routledge. Willis, Paul. 2003. Foot soldiers of modernity: The dialectics of cultural consumption and the 21st century school. Harvard Educational Review 73 (fall): 390–415.

8 “WHEN I CLOSE MY CLASSROOM DOOR…” Private Places in Public Spaces Jennifer Jenson Despite twenty-five years of research and commentary spotlighting women’s and girls’ underrepresentation in subjects like computing and engineering, little has changed (AAUW 1998, 1999; Chan et al, 2001; Sutton 1991; Whyte 1986). Equity work in the field of computers and engineering continues to suffer from a kind of willful optimism that somehow, with the ubiquity of computers in North American culture, girls and women will eventually share the same skills and therefore will have access to the same kinds of technically oriented jobs that boys and men have, although there has been no study to date that has shown that things are “getting better”.1 In this chapter, I focus on the sociopolitical dynamics of conducting a gender-equity research project in a school, as a researcher and “gender-equity activist” and/or “feminist.” I detail, in particular, how both teachers and students consistently made use of and called upon rhetorical practices that were antithetical to gender-based social change and that actively worked to construct “traditional” identities that did not necessarily resemble their daily lives. Although the school is not typically seen as a place where “radical community-based” research is invited or even accomplished, I’d like to suggest that the school is a site where activist research might do well to be more involved. For far too long now, schools, by definition “public” have closed their doors and abided, not by public policies or even discourses, but by their own peculiar, largely privately2 driven policies and agendas. It is all the more important, therefore, for researchers not to shy away from the school as a site where well-grounded, principled, equity-oriented research is desperately needed. This work, then, documents how the teachers and students in an elementary school were, in many senses, holding progressive social change at bay, although not necessarily through fully conscious, deliberate action. In the ways in which teachers and students “talked about” gender, their own identities, as well as the identities that they could imagine for others, they often “ventriloquated” identities and roles that in the public sphere of their lives were explicitly contradicted, yet within the school seemed to have particular “value.” In the first section, I take up and answer the question that is most often heard in response to gender-equity work, “what about the boys?” This question is the most frequent public protest to this kind of activist-oriented research, and I attempt to show how its vocalization marks, at the very least, a public attempt at engaging with questions around gender and identity, if only to reascribe attention to “the boys.” Within the study, more particularly, this question is sidelined as teachers, students, and researchers work to

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construct alternative ways of “talking about” gender, whereby issues of equity, instead of being overlooked or cautiously avoided, could be at least spoken about. I next show how my own identities within the school were a kind of foil or ruse for both teachers and students to attempt to construct me as a“normal girl,” in contrast to my fellow researchers who were too clearly marked as “queer,” “academics,” and “feminists.” Here, my presence in the school literally created a different audience for both teachers and students. I was someone outside the school who was less familiar with school politics, personal battles and alliances, and the daily, gritty banality of two hundred-plus days of attendance. After I detail the various “roles” I played and was called on to assume in the school, I focus on the identities and discursive practices of teachers in relation to gender, looking in particular at typical sites of resistance and at those cases when, despite everyone’s “best intentions,” stereotypical, normative impulses in relation to gender identities and technology were reaffirmed. And finally, I turn to the students’ own notions and expressions of gender identity as examples of the discourse that is “acceptable” in schools and their own resistance to a small policy change to make things more “equitable.” In my telling of these spoken and unspoken practices of teachers, students, and researchers, I hope my readers might do a little less reading between the lines. I hope that readers might be able to focus more fully on the underside of an equity-based research project in the “public sphere” of the school, which is prone to more “private” acts than public and which we as researchers often work hard in our reporting of research to maintain. I see these accountings, these “stories,” as evocative of the difficulty of doing gender-based research in a public institution that constructs the identities of those housed within it as merely “teacher” and “student,” without nuance, insisting all the while that that identity is “blind” to race, sex, class, ability, and so on. And I further suggest that, until there is more room for research accounts that unproblematically relate “findings” to an audience that is constructed as wanting “answers” we will continue to withhold the private, to the detriment of what could and should be a kind of public accounting.3 GENDER EQUITY, OR “WHAT ABOUT THE BOYS?” You should see the posturing that’s been going on since those machines came into that room. I get these little pipsqueak males coming in saying, “how many gigabytes has this got?” They’re just flexing their little parts. You can’t believe it I’m just appalled…. And they’re [the boys] this big [gestures, indicating that they are small], and they’re strutting their stuff. They’re the expert. They know everything. I think we’re going to have to be really diligent or it’s going to be totally taken over. —Teacher-librarian, Brookwood Elementary

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The broad goal of this interventionist research project was to investigate gender, equity, and educational uses of new technologies in an elementary school. My own work was embedded in a larger gender-equity research project, “GenTech,” that explicitly set out to study “success, interest and competence” (see Bryson and de Castell 1996; de Castell and Bryson, 1997; Jenson, de Castell and Bryson 2003).4 My work was one of several actionresearch projects located in the lower mainland of British Columbia and was based on collaboration among GenTech, a school district, an elementary school (Brookwood Elementary School),5 and a large computer hardware company. Its goal was to restructure access to computers through the creation of a new computer center in the school and to foster technological competence in female teachers and young girls through the provision of training on these computers. Although both boys and girls had access to the computers, by first providing training to female teachers and students (who then provided training to male teachers and students) it was intended that the girls and women would regulate the use, climate, and operation of the new computers. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, I made observations in the school, attended school meetings, worked with students and teachers on computers, and conducted structured and unstructured interviews with teachers and students. Preliminary observations and interviews in the school computer lab and the school generally, prior to the “intervention” portion of the study when I worked directly with teachers and students to make use of new computer technology, helped to provide an important foundation for understanding the culture of computing at that site (cf. Bryson and de Castell 1998; Huber and Schofield 1998; Schofield 1995). These initial observations confirmed findings of other researchers (Inkpen, Booth, Klawe, and Upitis 1995; Inkpen, Klawe, Lawry, and colleagues 1994; Schofield 1995; Sutton 1991) that student use of computers varied by sex—when I began observing, boys outnumbered girls (on most occasions) ten to one. Despite this early form of “documentation” of the “facts” about computer use at the school and, in fact, on all facets of this work, from teachers, students, parents, administrators, researchers, and colleagues, the most often-invoked question in response to this research was a discursive realignment away from a focus on girls and women to ask, “what about the boys?” In fact, this question has received a good deal of public attention lately: as a kind of “backlash” response to attending in recent years to girls in schools, there has been mounting outcry about boys’ underachievement and the need to attend to “what boys want,” instead of so much attention on girls, as if any were too much. I see the question, “what about the boys?” as a transparent effort to place boys once again at the center of a discussion about gender equity. It could also further indicate an unwillingness to focus on equity issues generally—inequity is something that has been conquered or righted and therefore no longer needs to be taken seriously. “Power,” Foucault writes, “is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations” (Foucault 1978, 4). He suggests that power is pervasive, unspecific, and relational. Power is not necessarily located in any particular person or institution, yet power relationships operate in an ongoing dialectic with resistance. Through these local points, these microresistances, the matrix of power can be undermined, challenged, and exposed. That questions like “what about the boys?” have invariably risen in gender-equity-focused discussions (Anjos 1999; Bryson and de Castell 1995, 1996, 1998; Crawford 1998; Hill,

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2002) seems to me to underline a need on the part of those who would so assert themselves to maintain traditional, patriarchal, and hierarchical power structures. These kinds of questions might also be seen to signal the destabilization of some gendered structures, partly because they are a point of resistance. Their [‘power relations’] existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of Revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case. (Foucault 1978, 95–96) Just as power, for Foucault, is “everywhere” (i.e., not necessarily emanating from a central source like a state, institution, or even an individual), so too is resistance. That is, from innumerable, local points, power relations can be challenged and undermined by focusing on the mechanisms through which a dialectical exercise of power and resistance take place. The question, “what about the boys?” therefore, and its near ubiquity, both within the school and without (conferences, presentations, workshops, hallway discussions, dinner conversations), signals for me not only a discursive site of resistance by those who utter it but also a vocalized reminder that “gender” is unproblematically presumed to be a binary—boys/girls, masculine/feminine. It is, ironically enough, those binaries that are invoked and subtly reinforced by gender-focused work. Thus, even as I struggled to cast myself outside binary conceptions of gender and sex, the work of an “equity”-focused project demanded that I use for my own devices the very categories I was asking those participating in the research to problematize. AMBIGUOUS CASTING I outline here the different identities and roles I assumed in relation to my own research and that of the larger GenTech project as a graduate student, research assistant, researcher, computer expert, teacher, and sometime informant. None of these identities, of course, is independent of the others, and most tend to overlap. I have somewhat artificially separated these selves here so that I might more fully show how my role as researcher within this school context was problematized and sometimes sidestepped altogether by myself and the project’s participants when such an acknowledgement (i.e., of my “researcher” and therefore “outsider” status) conflicted personally or professionally. Although a strong tradition in educational research leans toward the researcher as a unified, determined individual who operates in a research setting under specific and welldefined conditions, with preconceived questions and methods that guide and develop practices toward some research-oriented goal, I would not choose to describe myself or my practices so neatly. I might instead offer (as have de Castell and Bryson, 1997; Lather 1991, 1996; Visweswaran 1994; and Whyte 1986) that research, especially intervention research, is messy and often contentious, and that it is those tiny fissures of contention

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that offer possibilities for changes in attitudes and practices for both researcher and researched. In my work, practices were shaped by my ongoing conversations with the researchers de Castell and Bryson, by the teachers, by the students, and by the institutional practices of the school. In the beginning of the intervention, for example, it soon became apparent that scheduling time on the computers was going to be contingent on whether or not the librarian was using the library for teaching. Further complicating the time I spent with the students was whether their teachers felt that they could or should miss the hour that I would have them out of class (e.g., one teacher did not want her students to miss math). While this might seem merely to be a “management” issue in that it involved time, resources, and the application of those resources, I think it points to how difficult it can be to construct interventionist research if those who would participate or those who are “in charge” and agree in principle with a given agenda are simultaneously unwilling to give the time and/or access to resources that the project clearly needs in order to operate. Although half of the teachers in the school were committed to working to improve their own computer skills and to thinking through how to make better use of those technologies in their curriculum, where the project’s “equity” agenda was buried within the guise of “teaching people to use computers,” it was nonetheless in continual jeopardy of not being able to be completed. Research is a performance carried out by investigators. As a performance it takes place within the context of social norms and scripts; that is, it is social practice. (Layder 1998, 10) As a graduate student, my position within the school and without was regulated by the (mundane) hierarchies that accompany everyday academic/school positioning—that of teacher/student and learned/learner, to name just a couple. As a result, being a graduate student often meant that the teachers in the school saw me as “less threatening” and “more approachable” than the professors (Suzanne de Castell and Mary Bryson) who were also at the school, though less frequently than I was (I was still a student and “novice” researcher). And although I was “going to be” an academic, a researcher, indeed perhaps even a “professor “I did not yet have that status, which, I often felt, seemed to make me “more like the teachers” than “like the professors” in the ways in which the teachers identified with and talked to me. The “teaching” I did always occurred in the library and was overseen irregularly by the presence of the librarian. Whenever the students were using the computers, I was training them, observing them as they trained other students, and/or providing technical support as they practiced their skills on the software we were using. During the period that the students were with me in the library, typically no other teachers were present, so it was understood by the teachers and the librarian that the students were in my care. Despite being authorized to work on my own with the students, the librarian felt she was responsible for “keeping the noise level down.” If the students were being too loud, which happened quite often given that the female students were teaching other students how to use the computers, not by demonstrating with the mouse but by telling the students where to click on the screen, explaining verbally, and pointing out what actions would yield the appropriate results, the librarian would, in an extremely loud voice, ask them to be quiet (it was, after all, a “library”). The second time she asked them to “quiet

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down,” she would threaten them with being sent back to class. I mention this only in passing because, since I was not a “real” teacher, the librarian did not feel that it was my “job” to keep students quiet. I thought this was rather ironic when I considered that when the librarian was not there, I was expected by both her and the other teachers to be responsible for the students who were using the computers, including their noise level while in the library. Although I did not see the librarian’s persistent interference in what was happening in “her library” as an active attempt to interfere with the teaching component of the research, I did think that it was possible that the kind of engagement and “fun” that the students appeared to be having with all those observing (librarian, teacher, principal) might have been one of the reasons for that kind of policing. A RESEARCHER AND INFORMANT My role as researcher was to work in the school with female students on the computers, conduct interviews, and make observational field notes. Because I was in the school frequently, and because I had the opportu-nity to work with a fair number of students (more than 50), it also meant I was well-known and that there was some level of comfort with my presence in the school. Although all the other roles were part of how I was perceived at the school, there was no doubt as to my primary purpose, which was best and most cheekily summed up by a sixth-grade student, who said at the end of the project that she was glad that she hadn’t “ended up being my experiment or anything.” As a researcher, I think the most intriguing and necessarily dangerous role that I assumed within the school was that of an “informant” for the GenTech project and for my own research. The teachers were aware that I was reporting to de Castell and Bryson on the work that we did weekly as well as on the work I did with the students and any other relevant happenings within the school. This meant that, at times, they asked me not to “tell” about certain feelings or reservations that they might have, or about what did or did not occur on a weekly basis, which typically meant the information they were asking me to withhold would surface eventually. One particular illustrative incident occurred when there was significant teacher resistance to demonstrating their work in progress to the rest of the staff. They talked to me at length about their reservations for showing the staff incomplete projects, along the lines of, “it looks as if we haven’t done any work” “we don’t feel comfortable with the program yet,” and “we don’t have enough material.” At the end of our discussion, they asked me not to “tell” de Castell that they were not prepared to go forward with their demonstration. By the end of the day, the librarian had phoned de Castell to cancel the demonstration, arguing that they were “too busy” that week for it to go forward. I mediated between the teachers and the researcher by informing de Castell of my understanding of what the teachers had completed for the demonstration as well as their reservations and by informing the teachers about the options they could exercise to reduce the expectations they felt unable to fulfill; as a result, the teachers demonstrated their work to their colleagues. Feminist researchers like Visweswaran (1994) and Lather (1996) have written about “betrayal” of research subjects, and in many ways my role of informant carried this duplicitous labeling; however, my informing was not just on the subjects of the research, because the teachers would ask me to inform on project happenings and its researchers.

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Typically, these questions were of the prosaic variety like, “What are they [Bryson and de Castell] doing?” “Do they think the research is going well?” and “What do their colleagues think of the project?” At different times, I was also asked to provide personal details about my own life and the lives of the other researchers, and the teachers frequently talked in detail about their lives outside of school. I saw these interludes of “informing” at the teachers’ behest as an invitation to participate more fully as an “insider” in their lives and not just in the school. As a result, I was able to act as a “mediator” between de Castell’s and Bryson’s visible “queerness” and the teachers’ curiosity about their lived lives and practices, as well as with some of their veiled homophobia that most typically presented itself as “how do those kind of people live” questions.6 In the case of one teacher, however, it seemed to be an insurmountable issue, and she chose actively to avoid situations when de Castell or Bryson were present. Because I myself was not so “marked,” I was called on to play out the role of “good heterosexual” and field stereotypical questions about whether or not I had a boyfriend, when was I getting married, did I want children. My identity, it seemed, needed to be stable and recognizable for the teachers, and especially so given that I worked with two “out” researchers. This was somewhat also the case for the students, who very much wanted me to conform to standards of “femininity” and were quick to comment when I didn’t; as one student aptly put it, “Do you ever brush your hair? It could look so much better.”7 While we all assume different identities at different times in the course of a research project, I saw these multiple identities and roles as being available to me because I was not marked first and foremost as “queer.” In the highly normalized and normalizing heterosexual space of the elementary school, then, my apparent heterosexual identity gave me “access” to the research subjects in ways that were not made available to my colleagues. And perhaps one reason why this identity in particular seemed to be so important was because this was gender-focused research—research that asked its participants to “trouble” the status quo in the school (in this case a male-dominated computing culture), thereby assuming very different identities in relation to new technologies than they had had previously, becoming more expert and certainly not as “helpless.” As such, participants were willing to “play” with technologically more expert identities as long as those identities did not conflict with already-established feminine identities. In other words, my mainstream identity was a kind of reassurance that having technological expertise and being committed to gender equity did not necessarily result in being the kind of “queer” de Castell and Bryson clearly were, although, in some ways, it very much meant queering teachers’ and students’ own identities to assume more expert technological roles, and those altered identities conflicted with notions of masculinity and femininity, which were not only well established in their own lives, but well preserved and regulated within the culture of the school more generally. In these and many other ways, it was possible to do “radical activist” work within the school only if I wasn’t myself identified as “radical,” as long as I wasn’t too far outside the norm, and as long as there was a kind of public understanding of my private life. The “activism” and politics of de Castell and Bryson, while ventriloquated, rehearsed, and espoused by me, was perceived, out of their mouths, as too radical (as they have documented elsewhere), embodied as it was in their queer(ed) identities and private lives, the public naming of which, especially in schools, is not only dangerous, but oftentimes

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outright prohibited.8 So it was that my multiple identities, and very literally my body presumably marked as “straight, white, and kind of cute,” were able to occupy a space as “radical/activist/feminist researcher” as long as its public face was recognizable, familiar, safe. RESISTING CHANGE: GENDER EQUITY IN THE COMPUTER LAB When I began observations of the computer lab in the school, it was mainly to document who used it and for what purposes (Askew and Ross 1988; Dixon 1997). Francis (1997) and Shilling (1991) argue that boys dominate both space and time in school by appropriating academic resources and dominating space in areas (labs or workshops) where moving about is permitted or encouraged, and this was the case in this school. While I was observing in the lab, both the vice principal, Mr. Jones, and the teacherlibrarian, Mrs. Smith, began to notice as well who was making use of the lab. Mrs. Smith, in particular, would drop by to check in on me and stand at the door to nod or wave. She began to notice, as I had, that the lab was usually a chaotic, noisy place with a lot of older boys in it. She told me she was “horrified” by the changes that she felt had taken place in the lab since the “vice principal took over the lab at the beginning of the year.” She, said, furthermore, that she was dismayed that the lab seemed like such a “hostile,” “competitive,” “boy-dominated” place. The year before, when a “quiet” man with little formal computer experience and “two girls of his own” had run the lab, it had been a different place. She didn’t say how it had been different, just that it was different, and she attributed this difference directly to Mr. Jones. When I mentioned that the majority of students using the computers in the library were also boys, she said that boys were “taking over the school” but placed no direct blame for their dominance of the library computers. Mrs. Smith’s interest in my observations led to her consulting with Mr. Jones about the “chaotic” atmosphere in the computer lab. Together, they decided to bring it up at the next staff meeting. In the meantime, I continued to observe in the lab and the library, but Mr. Jones’s attitude toward me had changed. Whereas he had earlier been talkative when I met him in the halls or sought him out to tell him I was going to be in the lab observing, after the staff meeting he would nod to acknowledge my presence, and our “conversations” were reduced to perfunctory greetings. I mention here in the text that I perceived a change in his attitude and demeanor toward me because I believe this uneasiness was later reflected in his unwillingness to make changes to computer lab policy—changes that were based on a need to make access more gender equitable. A SMALL POLICY CHANGE Once the issue of boys’ rowdy dominance of the lab had been raised in the staff meeting, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones agreed to meet with other interested teachers to try to revise the computer lab policy to give greater access to girls and younger students. They attempted to provide more equal access to the computer lab by creating a system of

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passes and grade-specific days. Girls and boys in each class were given equal numbers of passes, and they were limited to using the lab one day a week depending on their grade. Mary Bryson, one of the researchers, and I attended the staff meeting in which this proposed policy change took place. At the request of the librarian, Bryson spoke briefly at the beginning of the meeting, framing her discussion of the need for change in terms of creating more “equitable access” for girls to the lab, emphasizing that the predominance of boys in the Brookwood computer lab was not unique—that most other researchers had found the same situation at both elementary and secondary schools—and suggesting that whatever policy change they committed themselves to at this point should be reviewed at a later date. When she had finished speaking (after less than ten minutes), Mr. Jones was invited to present the recommendations of the committee. He began by stating reasons for the need to change the lab policy. The primary reason for change he offered was not specifically to give girls better access—because, of course, they could always choose to go to the lab— but instead to “get order” because he perceived that the atmosphere in the lab was “out of control.” Several teachers (female) were quick to point out that the lab was out of control in large part because so many boys were using it, and that many of the girls might find that intimidating or, at least, unappealing. As the discussion progressed, Mr. Jones appeared more and more agitated: shifting in his seat, mumbling to himself, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and interrupting as the female teachers began to discuss reasons that they believed girls in their classes weren’t using the computer lab.9 That the vice principal chose to articulate as a discipline issue what had at first seemed to present itself as a clear case of inequality (so few girls using the lab) reveals not only a reluctance on his part to make the issue of gender visible, but as well a determination to maintain what Dorothy Smith (1987) calls “institutional order.” In The Everyday World as Problematic, she argues that institutions have their own particular forms of discourse that both include and exclude processes and practices: Professional training in particular teaches people how to recycle actualities of their experience into the forms in which it is recognizable within institutional discourse…. This ideological practice provides a procedure for subsuming what goes on in the classroom under professional educational discourse, making classroom processes observable and reportable within institutional order. (162) Smith’s discussion of institutional discourse helps identify the vice principal’s refusal of “gender” as a basis for changing policy as a manipulation of “institutional discourse,” which tends to render gender inequity in any classroom, lab, or staff meeting invisible. Another layer exists here as well: by shifting the focus away from the target of getting more girls to use the computer lab, the vice principal refocused attention on the boys. Paechter (1998) writes that “‘problems’ concerned with boys were more likely to be given time in meetings both within school and outside agencies, and that intervention strategies for boys were much clearer and explicitly defined than those proposed for girls” (21). In the case of this meeting, some teachers did remind Mr. Jones that part of the problem with “discipline” in the lab was that so many sixth- and seventh-grade boys were using it, and when they began discussing changes, they were determined that not as

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many older boys would use the lab at one time; a pass system was therefore established that they felt would most effectively redistribute the dynamics in the lab. Soon after implementation of the new policy to “restore order” to the lab, I observed a dramatic change, as an excerpt from my field notes illustrates: Before the lab opens there are girls hanging around outside…this is the first time I have observed girls standing outside the lab waiting for it to open. Although the exact number of boys and girls changed over the next 40 minutes, the average was around 5 girls, 7 boys…the first time I have seen this many girls in the lab at once. Only one of the girls is playing the DynoPark game, but all of the boys are. I can actually see there are girls in the school today. There are even girls going in and out of the lab, hanging around the computers, and talking to their friends. A couple of teachers pop their heads into the lab and make comments to me like, “there are actually girls in here” and “wow, big difference, eh?” I nod and smile. That this single change in policy resulted in such a significant increase in the number of girls using computers in the lab has enormous implications in how small academic policy shifts can result in large cultural changes around school resources. I continued to observe an increase in the number of girls in the lab for the rest of the school year—though they did not seem to use the lab with the frequency or the consistency of boys of the same age. In addition to more girls using the lab, a dramatic change occurred in the atmosphere in the lab in general—not only was it not nearly as loud, nor as crowded, but there were girls in the lab with their friends, using computers and talking to each other about the software they were using. I took the change in the lab environment generally to be one that was both a function of the increase in the number of girls there and of a more subdued, less aggressive approach to using the computers on the part of the boys in the school. Although many of the same boys continued to use the lab, they did not do so in the same manner as they had before. They usually did not move around the room as much, staying in their seats to discuss gaming strategies or computers in general; nor was the number of boys entering and leaving the lab as great, partly because this was much more limited under the new system. By restricting access to the lab, the teachers in the school created enough of a “space” where girls felt comfortable using lab computers with their friends. That this policy change resulted in such an increase in the number of girls using the lab suggests that girls had not stayed away from the lab in the past because they weren’t interested in playing games or in using computers generally; instead, it shows just how formidable an atmospheric barrier male cliques can be to girls. STUDENT “RESISTANCE”: EVERYTHING IS EQUAL Although there seemed to be consensus among the teachers that this small policy change had had a positive effect, making access to the lab more appealing to girls, student opinion on whether or not the change was positive differed largely by sex. Male students (especially older male students) felt that the change in the lab was negative and that they were being treated unfairly in some way. Most were not able to articulate in what

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particular ways they thought that they were being treated unfairly, stating only that they did not understand the “need” for change. In interviews I conducted at the end of the school year, many male students expressed their dissatisfaction with the environment in the lab after the policy change. For example, Kyle, a sixth-grade boy, expressed his dissatisfaction with the presence of girls in the lab and the infrequency with which he was now able to use it, stating, “I don’t think it’s that fair. There’s tons of girls. They’ve changed it so that each grade has one a week. We only get two times because we can’t go after school.” His response is not atypical. Most of the boys expressed some uneasiness at the greater and continued presence of girls in the lab, as well as the perception that the change in the lab somehow was “unfair” to them. Notice that Kyle begins his statement with how unfair it is that girls attend and then finishes by deflecting attention away from the problem that there are “tons of girls” to his disappointment in being able to use the lab only once a week. In the same interview, another student, Roger, contradicts Kyle’s statement that there are “tons of girls” when he reveals that boys were allowed access to girls’ passes if girls did not use them: KYLE: Most of the time girls don’t go anyways. The boys just take the girls’ passes. Q: Do they? KYLE: Yeah. I had to kick this guy out. I asked him if he was a girl and he said yes. Q: Do you think the system works? Because part of the reason they switched it over was to give girls more access to the lab. Do you think it’s working or has it helped? ROGER: Not really. They had a rule that if none of the girls went then the boys get the passes. Though not all the boys interviewed felt as Kyle did that there were “tons of girls” in the lab, most of their responses were that the changes in the lab were negative, like Roger, who seemed to think that girls weren’t using the lab any more than they had before. All of the girls’ responses, on the other hand, were positive; many of the girls stated that they used the computers more frequently and with friends. Teri, a seventh-grade girl explained that it was difficult for her to use the lab before they changed the pass system because there weren’t enough passes and students would often “hide” them so they could use them when they wanted: Q: So did you use the computer lab before they did the pass system? TERI: Yeah, not as much though. They always did have passes. Before there was just two or three for a class. People [boys] would just keep them in their desk and go down whenever they wanted. In my observations, it was not the case that there were “tons of girls” in the lab; only once while I was observing did girls physically outnumber the boys, and rarely did they occupy the same kind of space in the lab that the boys did (i.e., they did not move around as much, and they either sat together and played a game or sat apart and spoke to each other quietly).

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Although this policy change, then, literally “created space” for girls where before there had been none, the boys did not perceive that this was “fair” or “equitable.” Perhaps some explanation for why this might be is embedded in students’ discussions of why they might “choose” to study one subject instead of another in school. Both boys and girls identified their parents as being influential when they made choices about which school subjects to take, for example, but these reasons were often tied in with social expectations and the presence of friends—as Greg, a sixth-grade boy, eloquently states: I guess because boys are more task oriented, goal oriented. They want to get stuff done. They want to work. Boys are more physically oriented where girls are more into the abstract. Plus they’re taught that they should settle down and they should raise families. I guess that’s why more girls go to cookery and needlework. Plus some people are afraid that people will make fun of them…. I think it also comes from the parents, too. If the parents tell the boys to work in sports and everything. It’s because their friends don’t do it. If their friends go, then they go. If their friends don’t go, then they won’t because they’ll feel left out. When people are going into their teenage years they want to affirm their identities as girls and boys. They really want to avoid being seen as effeminate by not going into knitting and sewing and stuff like that. The opportunities are this stuff. So they choose to go there. Same with the girls except vice versa. Greg is the only example of a male student articulating what many female students did: that subject choice can have real social consequences for both boys and girls, such as “being seen as effeminate.” He further suggests that, because computers produce masculinity for boys (i.e., “avoid being seen as effeminate”), they like them (i.e., “they choose to go there”). Girls especially identified social factors like TV shows or being labeled as “weird” as possibly influencing subject choice, as these female students put it: CASSIE: Probably the girls think that it’s weird for a girl to be doing that kind of stuff. JULIA: Also, probably because things like metalwork, the girls probably think it’s hard. They probably think that you need to be strong or something. The boys probably think that it’s weird for boys to cook or do needlework. They probably think that everybody else will think they’re sissies or something. Or else the other boys could think that, when they get married, the girls will cook for them. ADELE: Usually men go to work and the girls don’t. AMANDA: You watch TV shows and girls have more interest in cooking. Because when they get older they know that the men are going to work. They know they have to learn this for when they get older. The girls have to cook and clean the house and do needlework.9 The responses from these fourth-grade girls are interesting in that they directly contradict their experiences in their own families: their mothers all work full time, and one is a single mother. Many of the reasons that boys and girls identified as factors in determining subject choice were often complex and contradicted their own experience. Riddell (1992)

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argues that school subjects are often presented to students in ways that ensure the formation and preservation of stereotypical gendered responses to a subject; physics, for example, was presented as abstract and complex (masculine), while home economics was depicted as concrete, practical, and of concern to women (feminine). This directly contradicts Greg’s earlier account above that attributes concrete tasks to more masculine roles as “girls are more into the abstract.” One way of viewing this apparent contradiction is to see masculinity and femininity as by definition oppositional—what is masculine is so only insofar as it can be distinguished from what is feminine, and what is feminine is always already a secondary relation to what is masculine, as Simone de Beauvoir (1961) long ago so persuasively argued. For example, if the “abstract” is seen to be preferable to the “concrete” (i.e., more intelligent), that will most typically be characterized as “masculine,” and visa versa. In Greg’s account, the concrete was seen as more masculine because that was the clear priority of the discussion. In my conversations with students, then, it became clear that they were already surprisingly comfortable in articulating stereotypical perceptions of school subjects as oppositionally defined and hierarchically related as more or less masculine or feminine.11 Although teachers were absent from the students’ discussion of factors that might influence decisions regarding school-subject choices, a statement by a sixth-grade student, Bernie, reveals her teacher’s expectations for the female students in her class. Bernie stated, “When we do art, the teacher expects us to be the best, so she wants us to help the boys.” Bernie highlights her teacher’s influence on the subjects that she is expected to excel at by virtue of her sex (subjects like art), whereas girls are discouraged from subjects like computers or physics because, as one of the boys I interviewed indelicately put it, “they [girls] don’t want to break a nail.”11 A small part of the boys’ resistance to the equity-based policy change can therefore be seen to be as derivative from what is “acceptable” school discourse—girls and boys are both equally aware of their sociocultural expectations, especially inside the school, even if these contradict their lived experiences outside the school. Within the school, then, and its acceptable cultural norms, the boys I interviewed were quite accurate to describe the policy change as unfair, because it very much was unfair, in light of the unspoken gender ideology governing daily technology-related practices of the school. THE PRIVATE AS POLITICAL Rather than read these resistances to a gender-equity initiative as tactics drawn upon in a conscious effort to avoid social change, I’d like to suggest that these tactics can be read alternatively as indications that change was already profoundly underway and the discursive strategies were employed not to “restore order” but to make sense of how things might well have already shifted—because things fundamentally had. Once named and acted on, longstanding but previously “invisible” inequities that have hitherto effectively disarticulated school-based gender norms from public—indeed legally obligatory—norms of gender-equitable access to educational resources could no longer not be seen by teachers whose silence had enabled such disarticulation to weather the storms of feminist-inspired demands for gender equality. In this way, the “public” had already insinuated itself in the “private” sequestered lives of those in the school. The

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public was now present in the school in ways it hadn’t been in the past, through the presence of the researchers and through the teachers’ and principal’s vocal commitment to a gender- and technology-equity initiative. This public intrusion had three significant consequences. First, it provided the teachers in the school with a kind of “public eye” with which they could view things they had hitherto been unable to see and then act to make changes to them. That is, some of the teachers were newly able to look around and see inequities they had either ignored in the past or not “taken up.” For example, once the research was begun, they “saw” the domination of the computer lab by the older boys in the school, vocalized that it was a “problem” (not just to one another, but publicly at a staff meeting), and implemented a corrective school policy. That teachers did not view the boys’ domination in the past as problematic is not all that surprising: Frigga Haug (1987) argues that if we were compelled to notice all the inequities we encountered each day we’d be unable to carry on with our lives. Her work on memory, more particularly, develops a notion of “subjectification” whereby “individuals work themselves into social structures they themselves do not consciously determine, but to which they subordinate themselves” (Haug 1987, 59). What is most significant about the policy-change example is that it was led by the teachers themselves who were no longer unconsciously subordinating themselves to the old “gender order” (the change had not been something I suggested). Moreover, students, like their teachers, were also able to both see and act on particular problems like playground domination on the part of the boys or, in the case of a particular teacher, the presumption that the girls in her class were “better at art” than the boys. In both cases, students were able to “speak up” and name the inequity that they perceived, and all of the teachers involved in the research commented that this had not been a regular occurrence in the school before. (For a fuller discussion of these changes, see Jenson, de Castell, and Bryson 2003.) The second “effect” of the intrusion of the public to the private setting of the school was a kind of illumination of both expected and self-imposed gender identities. Unlike the boys—who were repeatedly recognized to have identities outside the school (i.e., “public” identities) that were acknowledged and made use of inside it, evidenced by their being named unilaterally as “computer experts” and having knowledge and skills that they could not possibly have acquired at school (in this particular instance, about computer hardware and software)—girls were not recognized as knowing anything other than what they had been taught. Although “computer expert” was an identity that was readily applied to boys and the two male teachers in the school, it certainly was not one that the girls or their female teachers were comfortable with. Even at the completion of the project, an “expert” identity was still applied mostly to the boys, while the girls refused it altogether, relabeling their skills as being equivalent to knowing how to “explore” on the computer to solve problems and/or learn new programs. Like the earlier descriptions on the part of both boys and girls, not only were the institutional structures of the school solidifying what they already “knew” about which identities they could or could not assume without significant “risk” girls also very much knew that an “expert” identity in relation to technology was problematic—it meant being perceived as “different” as a “tom boy” or a “girl with short hair.” Meanwhile, as the students were busy self-regulating their identities, the teachers unproblematically reinforced gender

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stereotypes by insisting that all seventh-grade girls were “boy crazy” and that the sameaged boys were “immature.” Finally, it became clear that, within the confines of the project, certain things were not to be said, were not be recounted or retold—they were to remain “private.” This was forever in conflict with my public self, who, we all knew, was actively engaged in writing and talking about the research. In my dissertation, for example, I did not write about the young girl who whispered to me in a corner that she was worried about her friend because the friend had cut her hair and was being teased by other girls that she now “looked like a boy…. You know, like Mary [Bryson]” the obvious implication being that she “looked like a lesbian.” So I, with my long blondish hair, my privileged white skin, and my public hetero-sexuality spent the next ten minutes consoling both of them and the next half hour talking to the rest of the group about being “respectful” and not being so worried about someone’s hair cut—only to have things end with nearly the whole group stating individually that they really liked her hair. Some feminist intervention that was. I also did not write about how one of the teachers was conspicuously absent whenever de Castell or Bryson were present at lunchtime meetings. When I finally asked her if she was having “issues,” she said “no,” but our conversation was overheard by another teacher who, days later, informed me that her colleague was (in her words) “uncomfortable.” When I asked about what, she said that the colleague didn’t like the “lifestyle choice” of de Castell and Bryson. Good feminist interventionist researcher that I was, I said nothing and told no one. As teachers readily remind us, they “close their doors.” Never mind curriculum, pedagogy, textbooks, research, or policy—once those doors are closed, what happens is no longer “public”; the teacher-controlled private realm, mediated as it may be by peculiar institutional orders and traditions, is only marginally influenced by the “outside.” In this project, when the public was reintroduced to the school, it made possible a reformulation of an entrenched institutional hierarchical ordering that supported and enabled boys’ technological expertise more than girls’. In the vignettes I’ve recounted here, I’ve attempted to show how identities, discourses, and practices within the culture of a single school attempt to shift to recognize and accommodate (with little understanding and even misperception, at times) a gender-inclusive project. Through these more private accounts, now made “public,” I have sought to provide an “alternative reading” to an audience whose most typical response to “straight” descriptions of this work is to inquire about men/boys in order to destabilize precisely those kinds of takenfor-granted responses. I see this kind of research, and the reporting of it, as especially important for schools as it shakes up the status quo; it insists that teachers, students, and researchers are first and foremost political agents, that they can “have a voice” that will be “heard” and that they can act to bring about desired changes. As one project partici pant, a sixth-grade girl, so eloquently put it, Computers, for sure, I’ll take. And now I’ve seen the percentage of guys, I’ll try to get my friends interested in computers and say, “Hey, look, ninety percent of the guys graduating are in computers, but we could get it up to fifty and fifty percent.” I think that’s good. Because you know, guys will get all the jobs. You know, and just like in the olden days, we’ll be stuck at home.

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POSTSCRIPT: PRACTICING REFLEXIVE RESEARCH It needs to be remembered that the terms and conditions of this kind of radical shifting are “shifty” themselves. A fine balance must be struck, or so it has seemed in this set of “gender-equity” projects,12 between gender trouble and gender conformity; no amount of tact or care or strategy or, indeed, coercion will make it possible for those whose unregenerate gender nonconformity simply cannot be “recuperated” or normalized to effectively carry out interventions that so profoundly threaten the estab-lished gender order of the public school. Just as we find ourselves in our research practices leveraging simplistic gender binaries in order to effect gender-inclusive educational reform, so we find ourselves having to assume (or find surrogates who can assume for us) “normal” gender identities in order to effect a destabilization of educationally inequitable gender norms in schools. Interestingly enough, this is the kind of paradoxical and contradictory trade-off, moreover, that researchers themselves either fail to notice or strategically elide or “forget” in their reporting of the treacherous and precarious work of chipping away at the private life of our purportedly “public” schools. Because research, just as much as school, keeps many of its gender troubles “private.” My hope in naming these “private” gender-research troubles is that, in reporting as in practicing gender-equity research, naming makes seeing possible. For now, seeing may be as good as it gets. NOTES 1. I will refrain from detailing this literature, as I and many others have extensively outlined this problem in other places, and I see this kind of accounting as less relevant to the arguments I will present in this chapter. 2. By “private” I mean to indicate both the private selves that students and teachers bring to school with them each day, some of which are given more public “space” or “hearing” than others, and the sociopolitical spheres and negotiations that govern daily school life. 3. For an interesting re-accounting of a research project, see Sarah Michaels’s and Richard Sohmer’s (2000) essay, “Narratives and Inscriptions: Cultural Tools, Power and Powerful Sense-Making,” in which they reanalyze Michaels’s 1988 work on students’ accounts about “seasonal change.” In this reexamination of her work, they are startled to find that their own sociocultural biases led to their (now) false presumption that the “white boy” in their interviews was originally considered to be the most “scientific” in his discourse on how seasons change. Their reconsideration of the work focuses primarily on how the use of narratives and inscriptions by students, teachers, and they as researchers works to “enable and constrain” them, and it does not therefore engage directly with what was “left out” of Michaels’s original “story.” What was “missing” was a public acknowledgement of the race of those students’ involved and a sociocultural grounding of their research within the then(and still now) public framework of gender research, which has for years shown how girls’ math and science knowledge is discounted in schools. 4. For more information on the GenTech project, see http://www.shecan.com. 5. The name of the school and all names of project participants have been changed. 6. In their essay “From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: On Finding Oneself in Educational Research,” de Castell and Bryson (1998) describe their experiences as queer researchers prior to this project. It is important to note here that not just the teachers were imposing these identities on me, because, in light of their prior experiences with school-based fieldwork by visibly “queer” researchers, de Castell and Bryson saw my “mainstream” appearances as not insignificant to the success of the project in that school.

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7. For a discussion of the social significance of hair for young girls, see “The Hair Project” in Female Sexualization, edited by Frigga Haug, pages 91–112. 8. The Surrey School District in the lower mainland of British Columbia is still embroiled in a battle over whether or not “other” families can be depicted in children’s books, and just recently a teacher in the United States was dismissed after “coming out.” 9. I am fully aware that this description is less than complimentary and do not make it lightly. I have chosen to include it because it typifies the often-hostile reaction that I have seen to the work that Anjos, Bryson, Crawford, de Castell, Hill, and I have encountered during our gender-equity and technology work. It should also be noted that this description has led many a reader—and indeed an examiner at my Ph.D. thesis defense—to question whether I “hate men.” I take this kind of discomfort as an uncomfortable “recognition of self” in my description of Mr. Jones, and I make no apologies for what still is a far more muted example than I might have included. 10. “Do needlework.” This response was partially generated by the kinds of questions I was asking that were related to available, “on the books,” subjects for secondary school in British Columbia that still include “needlework.” This student (as were all others) was remarkably adept at understanding her “roles” and articulating what was expected of her, including doing “needlework,” although I imagine that she had little idea of what that might involve. 11. Archer (1992) reported that girls view “masculine” subjects as “difficult,” but boys view them as “interesting,” while “feminine” subjects are perceived by girls to be “easy” and by boys to be “boring.” 12. Using computers is not physical work. Notice, however, how readily the language of another highly sex-stratified domain (physical work) is invoked here to express difference, despite the evident contradiction that using computers makes few physical demands. 13. See Anjos (1999), Bryson and de Castell (1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998), Crawford (1998), Hill (2002), and Jenson (1999) for descriptions and analysis of related gender-equity projects.

REFERENCES AAUW, American Association of University Women. 1998. Separated by sex: A critical look at single-sex education for girls. Report commissioned by the AAUW. Association of University Women Educational Foundation. ——. 1999. Gender gaps: Where schools still fail our children. New York: Marlowe. Anjos, E. 1999. Students speak: Accounts of gender, equity and technology from an action research project. Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Archer, J. 1992. Gender stereotyping of school subjects. The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 5:66–69. Askew, S., and C.Ross. 1988. Boys don’t cry: Boys and sexism in education. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press. Bryson, M., and S.deCastell. 1993. En/gendering equity: On some paradoxical conse quences of institutionalized programs of emancipation. Educational Theory 43(3): 341–55. ——. 1994. Telling tales out of school: Modernist, critical, and postmodern “true stories” about educational computing. Journal of Educational Computing Research 10(3):199–221. ——. 1995. Sexing the texts of educational technology. In Gender in/forms curriculum, edited by J.Gaskell and J.Willinsky. New York: Teachers College Press. ——. 1996. Learning to make a difference: Gender, new technologies and in/equity. Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal 3:119–35. ——. 1998. Gender, new technologies, and the culture of primary schooling: Imagining teachers as luddites in/deed. Journal of Policy Studies 12(5):54–67.

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Chan,V., K.Stafford, M.Klawe, and G.Chen. 2001. Gender differences in Vancouver: Secondary students interests related to information technology careers. Available online at www.mun.ca/cwse/Chan,Vania.pdf. Accessed September 7, 2003. Crawford, C. 1998. “Winning women”: A study of the development of technological competence at an all-girls’ school. Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. de Beauvoir, S. 1961. The Second Sex. New York: Bantam Books. de Castell, S. and M.Bryson. 1997. Don’t ask, don’t tell Curriculum: Toward new identities. New York: Garland Press. de Castell, S., and M.Bryson. 1998. From the ridiculous to the sublime: On finding oneself in educational research. In Queer theory in education, ed. W.Pinar. New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dixon, C. 1997. Pete’s tool: Identity and sex-play in the design and technology classroom. Gender and Education 9(1):89–104. Foucault, M. 1990/1978. The history of sexuality: Vol 1, An introduction. Robert Hurley (translator), English translation copyright, Random House 1978, published by Vintage Books, 1990. Francis, B. 1997. Power plays: Children’s construction of gender and power in role plays. Gender and Education 9(2):179–91. Haug, F. 1987. Female sexualization: A collective work of memory. Translated by E.Carter. London: Verso. Hill, C. 2002. Contradiction, culture and computers. Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Huber, B., and J.Schofield. 1998. “I like computers, but many girls don’t”: Gender and the sociocultural context of computing. In Education/technology/power: Educational computing as a social practice, edited by H.Bromley and M.Apple. Albany: State University of New York Press. Inkpen, K., K.S.Booth, M.Klawe, and R.Upitis. 1995. Playing together beats playing apart, especially for girls. CSCL ‘95 Proceedings: 1–6. Inkpen, K., M.Klawe, J.Lawry, K.Sedighian, S.Leroux, and D.Hsu. 1994. “We have never forgetful flowers in our garden”: Girls’ responses to electronic games. Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching 13:383–403. Jenson, J. 1999. Girls ex machina: A school-based study of gender, culture and technology. Ph.D. thesis, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Jenson, J.S.de Castell and M.Bryson. 2003. “Girl talk”: Gender, equity and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture. Women’s Studies International Forum 26(6):561–73. Lather, P. 1991. Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. ——. 1996. Troubling clarity: The politics of accessible language. Harvard Educational Review 66(3):525–45. Layder, D. 1998. Sociological practice: Linking theory and social research. London: Sage. Michaels, S., and R.Sohmer. 2000. Narratives and inscriptions: Cultural tools, power and powerful sense-making. In Multiliteracies: Literacy and the design of social futures, edited by B.Cope and M.Kalantzis. London and New York: Routledge. Paechter, C. 1998. Gender, power and schooling. London: The Falmer Press. Riddell, S. 1992. Gender and the politics of the curriculum. London: Routledge. Schofield, J. 1995. Computers and classroom culture. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Shilling, C. 1991. Social space, gender inequalities and educational differentiation. British Journal of Sociology of Education 12(1):3–28. Smith, D. 1987. The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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Sutton, R. 1991. Equity and computers in the schools: A decade of research. Review of Educational Research 61:475–503. Visweswaran, K. 1994. Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Whyte, J. 1986. Girls into science and technology: The story of a project. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Section 3 Public Acts

9 WORKING BETWEEN UNIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY Shifting the Focus, Shifting the Practice Erica R.Meiners (with engagements from Salome Chasnoff and Roberto Sanabria) ROBERTO SANABRIA: I first heard the term “poverty pimps” back in the late 1980s while teaching at Latino Youth Alternative High School. There were indeed researchers lurking about who wanted to take a close look at what was happening in the school. Most of the students were second- and third-generation Mexicans; they struggled against gangs, police brutality, broken families, drugs, and inadequate public schools. I was insulated from the researchers who were desperate to vivisect both staff and students. The director of the high school kept them at a distance and kept us focused on our mission. Occasionally, however, she would recount an anecdote or two about “rejected would-be researchers.” She named these people in the context of a broader discussion that emphasized the importance of protecting our students from poverty pimps with self-serving motives. SALOME CHASNOFF: How do we make academic research more humane? I become close to people I work with. When I make a video I work with an individual or a group of people over a long period of time. I see them over and over again. When I edit a tape I watch them making the same gesture or smile hundreds of times. I tend to fall in love with them. But not in the quotidian sense where I want to sleep with them. I fall in love with them. I don’t know how else to say it. That is part of what prepares me to represent them in the very best way possible. I don’t know how useful that would be for an academic researcher or an educator. You are needing to be more critical. Maybe you are needing to hate the subjects. Maybe the focus needs to change?

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INTRODUCTION I participate in a variety of projects in Chicago that are tenaciously collaborative university-community educational initiatives, in particular several that are connected to organizing and educational work against the prison industrial complex (PIC) (Davis 2000).1 Partially through my primary and paid employment as a professor of Educational Foundations and Women’s Studies at a university, I have the privilege of moving among these varied geographic, cultural, and philosophic spaces, and I am able to work with varied community-based activists such as Salome Chasnoff, the Executive Director of Beyondmedia, a grassroots feminist-community organization that produces alternative media for social change, and Roberto Sanabria, a community educator at both a high school for formerly incarcerated women and men and Chicago’s Puerto Rican Community Center. As my investments—emotional, intellectual, professional, and more—overlap and deepen, my attempts to negotiate and to move between these interrelated community and university spaces cause multiple kinds of persistent tensions. Although I recognize that these locations and identifications—community and university—are constructed and shifting,2 I simultaneously recognize the materiality of these locations and identifications because it is in the/a materiality that frictions occur. For example, I encounter a polite pressure from the university to document and render quantifiable and successful the work I do inside and outside the university for my academic portfolio. I negotiate the (not incorrect) assumptions in community spaces that I am a gatekeeper who controls access to university-based resources. I am the recipient of remarks (not incorrect) at academic conferences in which I am criticized for trading in my community work for academic status. I witness and participate in partnerships between community organizations and universities that are fraught with layers of tensions: miscommunications, misunderstandings, and assumptions about resources, and more. The recurrence of these events and encounters usually does not inhibit the material work, but these moments have come to characterize a significant thread of my experiences. I am tired of repeating and reanimating these dynamics. While working in coalitions that are composed of varied constituencies can be as uncomfortable as hell, as Bernice Johnson Reagon writes (1983), I believe that some of the tensions I experience and point to in this chapter originate partially from my own ignorance about the material locations from which community activists work, and from my lack of knowledge about my own material and epistemic institutional and disciplinary locations (and their corresponding blindspots).3 My ignorances—a form of “arrogant perception” that I suggest in this chapter is connected with my disciplinary affiliation and my institutional home, the university—have been costly for me to identify and to unlearn.4 This chapter originates, in part, from my work and from dialogues with Roberto Sanabria and Salome Chasnoff about university-community collaborations.5 Roberto (a longtime educator and activist in Chicago) and I have worked together in the adult high school for more than two years. Salome, as stated earlier, is the founder of a small feminist non-profit organization. As someone who is relatively new to the position of

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tenure-track university labor, I am under no romantic delusion that community spaces are better, or that those outside of universities are more enlightened, more connected to the masses, or more “ethically good.” To maintain the ability to do the kind of universitycommunity work I want to do from the university spaces I inhabit, and to think through these recurring tensions, I collect information from collaborators, allies, co-participants, and others. Perhaps if, as Chris Cuomo suggests, queers are “truth-tellers” about sexuality, community-based activists are a kind of “truth-tellers” about the impacts of collaborations between university-based researchers and community-based activists.6 I write this chapter, then, with a desire that an articulation of some tensions identified by myself and my community-based allies might function as an institutional ethnographic practice, to hijack Dorothy Smith’s methodology (1987), that can offer (to me primarily, but hopefully to others in similar contexts with similar desires) a mapping of the terrain.7 In the first part of this chapter, in the context of a community adult high school, I offer a discussion of the treachery implicit in moves between university and community spaces; in the second section I offer a brief contextualizing engagement with the limitations of disciplinary practices and ways of knowing; in the third section, in the contexts of a second project, 30 Days of Art and Education on Women’s Incarceration, I describe an awkward learning process incurred when facilitating community-university partnerships. I end with a rather uncomfortable position for myself—what to make of the affect, the intimacy, that has moved me to think through these disciplinary and material locations? Throughout this chapter I include excerpts from dialogues with Salome Chasnoff and Roberto Sanabria, with their permission. In addition to material from these dialogues, I offer, in the spirit (if not in the rigorous methodology) of the textured narratives in María Lugones’s (2003) Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, “true stories” to animate this discussion. I pursue this writing with reservations. Is it “vanity ethnography” (Van Maanen 1988) to contribute to academic literature that depicts one’s own internal angst at these relationships? So damn what? Get over it. Who cares about your anxieties? This is the price you pay for the perks you possess. Could it be a form of “studying up” (Nadar 1984) to report in academic spaces on projects that frequently do not cast universities (or university-based researchers) in a positive light? What about the many bodies (largely folk of color) that participate in the projects I describe in this chapter that are subject to a kind of pointed erasure in a discussion that centers on me? And can’t I always get some academic mileage out of the-orizing my failures (Hermes 2002)? I accept these risks— partly because my desire is that this chapter, written for a border-crossing audience, as Celia Haig Brown wrote in 1992, can contribute to the work of anti-racist, feminist activists who theorize, envision and practice justice I also work to focus on the institutional practices because I believe there is an excess of representations (often by academics) about the poor and the marginalized in circulation. Lack of data is (generally) not the problem, rather, I question what is done with these data, what interventions, organizing and political action is undertaken (by academics and others). As Michelle Fine notes: “My work has moved towards institutional analysis because I worry that those of us interested in qualitative inquiry and critical ‘race’ theory have focused fetishistically on those who endure discrimination” (Fine 1997:57). Perhaps research, “the cultural gaze of surveillance,” (64) requires some recalibrating? As Sarah Hoagland writes, can our competencies and our locus of enunciation be changed?

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ACTIVISM OR POVERTY PIMPING? AT THE ADULT HIGH SCHOOL In the summer of 2001 I collaborated in the organization of an alternative high school for formerly incarcerated men and women.9 Based on previous work in relation to the prison industrial complex (PIC), my collaborators and I recognized that there was a deep need for relevant education programs for those formerly incarcerated,10 and we worked to create a geographically accessible program that could provide a relevant, free, educational program that was shaped to/for the specific needs of this population. This school is affiliated with a private school and is therefore a diploma program, not a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) program. The curriculum is connected to real-life experiences, and the faculty are all unpaid. This is a competency-based program; to complete the program successfully, participants must attend all classes, complete the work assigned in each class to the instructor’s satisfaction, and complete a graduation portfolio that contains, in addition to work undertaken that semester, a résumé, an assessment of all the competencies they have acquired from formal/informal contexts, and an autobiographical statement. Attendance is the most important requirement and the most difficult to fulfill.11 Classes began in the fall of 2001. Twenty participants attended two one-and-a-half-hour classes four nights a week for fifteen weeks. In the past two years, four fifteen-week programs have been offered, accepting approximately twentyfive students per “cohort”; approximately twenty participants finish the program or graduate at the end of the fifteen weeks. More than 60 percent of the participants in the school are African American males. In 2001, approximately 30,000 people were released from prisons in Illinois and about half of this population moved (or returned) to five neighborhoods in Chicago (with the exception of the public housing projects in these neighborhoods as those with felony convictions are prohibited access to public housing—even to visit). The school is adjacent or close to these five re-entry neighborhoods, and the eight-block square radius around the school has no adequate financial services (predatory lending only), no “affordable” chain grocery stores, no movie theaters, and no parks. Many participants in the program, like William, convicted by an all-white jury as a teenager in the late 1970s, spent more than thirty years in prison and arrive at the school because they live in a residential transition house next door; they desire community and want the diploma that they were actively robbed of decades ago. The women, who have typically served shorter sentences and retained connections to children, siblings, and/or parents, enter the program actively planning their college or vocational programs after they graduate. Those who have pursued college or university programs after graduating from the high school have been women. During the first semester of the high school program, I felt as if all teachers and the participants were deeply engaged, and the mythology of doing something new gave us all momentum. Our faculty meetings were vibrant and exciting. December 2001, graduation for that first class was held in a small chapel that was overflowing; people had to stand three-and four-deep behind the last row of pews. The subsequent semesters have been harder. Time works against all, teachers and participants. Fundamental literacy problems are hard to address in a fifteen-week program. For participants who have been out of the “schooling loop” for ten or twenty years, becoming acclimatized to reading ten pages a

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day is a shift. As most of the teachers have at least one other paying job, we have difficulty coordinating our curriculum to make the in-class time as productive as possible. As the third year of this project starts, as this school develops a certain kind of small positive profile in the city, and as I simultaneously begin to represent aspects of this school in academic spaces, my varied stakes in this project prove to be more difficult to leverage. I moved into this work as an unpaid organizer and teacher, yet my research and writing areas have shifted (largely because of my involvement with this project) to encompass areas related to the PIC and education. I am not a community-based researcher and I have only documented aspects of the project (including this chapter) that are of use to “outsiders.”12 While I deliberately elected to “study up” or to study at least horizontally (not to research the participants in the program or the community that I have access to), I know that my affiliation with this high school offers my PIC research a measure of legitimacy and, in some spheres, status. As my relationships with this program as an organizer and as a teacher deepen, so do my investments with the people: teachers, community members, participants, and others. Former graduates contact me and want to know how to get into the university or community colleges or vocational programs. Because “ex-felons” are banned from some fiftyseven different professions/jobs in Illinois (The Economist 2002, 26) and because those convicted of drug offenses are restricted access to the main financial way that lowincome citizens in the United States access post-secondary job training and education (PELL Grants), the work of the school extends. The workload develops as relationships expand, and I start to think about how to grow the program, get more bodies involved, to meet these needs. In our conversations and email exchanges, Roberto, a teacher in the high school program, offers a reminder to contextualize our school’s success: ROBERTO: What is clear is that there are more ex-offenders holding high school diplomas thanks to our program. What is not clear is if this makes a substantive difference in their lives and in their communities. One could argue that those who sought the program were already self-motivated and would have searched and hustled to find something similar if the school were not available. All I can go by is anecdotal and visceral. I do think our program is a profound resource. Nonetheless, the high school alone is not enough. If democratic social change from the ground up is to occur, other meaningful acts need to happen in concert, such as affordable housing, child care, and health care, the availability of college scholarships and grants, as well as legislation making precious jobs less scarce for exoffenders. Some of the coalition work that Roberto describes might be achieved through the recruitment of more university-based personnel into this project. I hesitate to do this kind of outreach, as my experience bringing this project into academic spaces is problematic, bringing reprimands for doing research and requests for access to do research: ERICA, November 2002: I have just come from an academic conference where I have talked generally about my work in some community-based projects and initiatives. I am politely yet pointedly asked by another

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academic in the Q & A session after the panel discussion how I negotiate the fact that I profit academically from this “grassroots work.” I avoid the question. Later, on the drive back to my house, I worry and get angry. Of course I profit! I want to counter with “what the hell do you do,” but I have thought about asking this very same question of the work of others many times. The questions of academic profiteering or, to use the term introduced to me by Roberto, “poverty pimping,” justifiably originates from the ongoing histories of how academics do active harm to marginalized individuals and communities.13 I am also asked by academic colleagues for access to do research: ERICA, May 2003: I meet this white lady at a party who is famous in small and even smaller circles. “As a sociologist” is how she starts her sentences. We chat, and she tells me that she is interested in studying lesbians in prison and wants to do some preliminary research before she thinks through her research and her book proposal. Can she sit in for a few weeks at my high school? Come with me to work? I feel awkward—and wonder what it means that in some academic spheres I am defined by this work at the school. I have learned to be more flexible during both of these encounters because this project relies on free labor, in particular the surplus of labor available at universities,14 yet how do I turn these encounters into dif-ferent kinds of moments? While universities have institutional research review boards that theoretically adjudicate the potential harm of the research to the individuals or groups that participate, this process of assessing the benefits, costs, and rewards of participating in research is not as prevalent or as well organized from the subjects’ end, largely because, as Tuhiwai-Smith highlights, communities do not have the resources. “Most community projects require intense community input. The implications of such input for impoverished communities or communities under stress can be enormous” (1999, 140). Roberto suggests that perhaps the high school should have a process in place, like the Puerto Rican Community Center (PRCC) has, to assess the potential benefits to the PRCC from collaborating with university-based researchers. ROBERTO: The work of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center emphasizes both the importance of self-determination as well as the celebration of our cultural expressions. Therefore, the Puerto Rican native who is attracted most to our mission and finds herself doing work with us is a staunch proindependence advocate. Since her reason for working with us is primarily political, it is not her goal to investigate our community. I leave these encounters and conversations with Roberto knowing that I will not stop reporting on this project; it is too much a part of my work and life, and the PIC is too much of a pressing issue in the United States. Although I want to continue to produce work for academic audiences that addresses this project, in particular because I am

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unwilling to forfeit the massive set of economic, political, and cultural resources that the university has access to, I also desire a change. I long for more of a “both/and” response from my academic colleagues. The work is fraught with power inequities, I “benefit”; and a recognition that the withdrawal from the daily work that needs to be done, or simply being a good observer and researcher, is not enough. University and disciplinary histories (as well as race/class legacies) shape our encounters, yet they need not fully determine these possibilities. How can our skills contribute to negotiating these histories and positionalities? How can we respond to each other with more generosity? How can those with access to institutional resources work to create connections with communities and the academy instead of standing on each other’s necks? To what extent does our disciplinary training shape our engagements in the field and the possibilities of our understandings of the connections between our academic work and struggles for “justice”? ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE DISCIPLINE I am hardly the first to pose these questions, and scholarship in research methodology provides an ongoing dialogue on the roles, desires, and possibilities for university-based activist/scholars. Feminist, queer, and/or anti-racist allies, advocates, and activist scholars within the field of educational research (also in sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines) think through many of the methodological and epistemological difficulties surrounding the inherent conflicts between their political, economic, and cultural goals and the scholarly goals and practices of a university-based researcher. In particular, in the 1980s and 1990s scholars grappled with an acknowledgment of the betrayal inherent in feminist ethnographic work.15 The competing goals of the practices of research and the desires for a progressive intervention/social change in the lives of the “subjects” of the research, collide.16 These dialogues moved the research paradigm into interesting terrain, identifying “new” methodological processes (reciprocity, etc.) and some corresponding epistemological questions, as a response to the inherent ethical political dilemma created by the coupling of ethnography/ research and the everyday work for justice. I benefited immensely from reading these exchanges and from the methodological changes hardwon by feminist and anti-racist scholars across the humanities and the social sciences. As an academic in the field of educational studies,17 I argue that this field has additional betrayals that are built into the genre when we set out to engage in activistoriented justice work from our universities. Although disciplinary organization may be as anachronistic as “19th century political maps,”18 and education (perhaps more so than other social science discipline) is clearly deeply interdisciplinary as it borrows methods from sociology and anthropology and moves between and uses theoretical tools for analysis from a variety of fields,19 disciplinary codes still possess power. As Judith Stacey writes, Disciplines actually do discipline their members by structuring our access to particular discursive communities. Disciplinary institutions establish the journals we are expected to receive, if not read, the professional organizations we are expected to join, the meetings we attend, the

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curriculum we teach and learn, the peer reviewers who evaluate our work, and even the consequential quotidian geography of our social networks and contacts. (1999, 693) Graduate students in the field of education are disciplined in the discipline (however recently packaged and murky this canon may be). Despite its interdisciplinary nature, the “consequential quotidian geography” of the educational studies trajectory, undoubtedly a field more complex than I sketch, has the built-in betrayals and power imbalances that correspond with the contours of the field: adults researching children or university professors constructing knowledge about/for/with school teachers, and so forth. Our disciplinary ways of knowing frame our possibilities for inquiry and shape, as Hoagland suggests, our limited locus of enunciation: To venture forth into this discomforting world, Western science wants to always already know, to protect itself from a con while simultaneously asking for one, to greatly reduce the work it must do, to avoid responsibility, respons-ability, the ability to respond. The perfect john. And as johns are incompetent lovers, so our locus of enunciation prepares us to be incompetent knowers, particularly in our ability to engage, to listen to Others, to enter the story. (2003, 33) Are we trained as good researchers, as good educational scholars, to be good johns? Does our disciplinary affiliation with the university prepare us to be incompetent knowers? What if we have the desire to be more competent lovers, more competent knowers? What moves us to these places? DOING THE HEAVY WORK: 30 DAYS OF ART AND EDUCATION ON WOMEN’S INCARCERATION SALOME CHASNOFF: For me, what I do—I sit in the office and write grants—I get on the phone begging for money. When I am taping, I am carrying a lot of crap—heavy equipment—I don’t have a big crew that follows me around and does what I tell them. Basically I am working alone or with a volunteer or a student. That is not glamorous. It is hard work. Physically, it can be really exhausting and it requires a lot of concentration, because we use our hands so much in our work. That is another thing that is not respected too much by academics: our physical labor, when we carry heavy things. In 2002 a group of community organizations and universities collaborated with Beyondmedia to produce a multimedia installation in Chicago, 30 Days of Art and Education on Women’s Incarceration. This multimedia project connected personal stories to the conventional statistics of women’s incarceration and developed new audiences for public dialogue. The installation, Voices in Time, traveled to five public sites across Chicago, four of which were located in communities significantly impacted by

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incarceration. The installation incorporated the first-person narratives of currently and formerly incarcerated girls and women in diverse forms (video narratives, hand-written texts, drawings, and statistics) and included the Women’s Prison Quilt made from sewntogether remnants of bits of clothing contributed by women and girls in prison and transitional shelters. The opening at each site was “kicked off” with a live performance of a theater piece that was entirely created and performed by women recently released from prison, Only Women Bleed, featuring the fabulous performer and artist Pamela Thomas. Each performance was followed by an open town hall-style community dialogue facilitated by the performers and a staff member of a community organization that does advocacy work with/for women in the PIC. At each town hall forum, I was deeply moved by the reactions of audiences and struck by the limitations and the possibilities to move audiences into politicized actors. Specifically, at one site during the question-and-answer session, a woman in the audience stood up and asked the panel (and the organizers) what were we going to do next. She said that the performance and forum had offered experiences and information that were so important, and yet there were only 150 people in the room. More people needed to hear this important information about women in the prison industrial complex, she said, and we were only reaching a small number—what were we going to do about that? Before any official woman involved in the 30 Days event could respond, another woman in the audience stood up (a fabulous activist nun, but not a plant) and said that the question is not what “we the organizers” are going to do, but what is the audience going to do with the knowledge they had received this evening. What are you going to do now that you know about the exploitation of prison labor, the realities of the drug war, and draconian parental-rights termination laws in Illinois that dramatically impact women in prison? The entire room witnessed this powerful exchange. 30 Days was a tenaciously successful university-community collaborative initiative. We received funding (albeit not enough to cover the actual costs) to produce the event. More than 12,000 people viewed the installation/performance. The women who created the performance received money and experience to list on a résumé. The town hall forums were provocative, and each neighborhood location drew together diverse audiences for these dialogues. This project, and working in community with Salome, resulted in an opportunity for me to rethink my relationships to the university and to recognize what a privilege (and an incredible arrogance) it is to be part of an organization (the university) and to accept the status and resources and to not know the intimate material realities that scaffold your day-to-day labor. As a tenure-track faculty member in a university, I can move through my institution unaware of the labor and structures that enable me to do my work: the salaries of the staff, the tuition students pay, the budget of the department, and more. My work on the 30 Days project offered me a sharp education on my own institutional location. I cannot recruit community organizations to partner with my institution if I have no sense of my own terrain and no power to support these partnerships. While this project was supported financially through grants acquired in part because of the university-community partnership, it was produced and designed by community organizations, Beyondmedia and Chicago Legal Aid for Incarcerated Mothers (CLAIM), and formerly incarcerated women from the city of Chicago. As the only universitybased individual somewhat centrally involved with this project, my main role was in the co-

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conceptualization and grant-writing stage and some physical support before and during the 30 Days. My university (with me as the fiscal agent) was in charge of allocating the money. Perhaps the granting agency assumed that the university was the most “stable” partner and that as an institution it could be held accountable for the money/project. Funding shapes coalitions and possibilities for engagement, and the importance of funding cannot be overlooked. Funding can literally dictate both the work and the relationships that partners enact. Accessing grant or foundation money can require a community or grassroots organization to seek relationships with institutions, including universities, not only for the perceived legitimacy affiliated with the university, but because of the reporting and accounting processes that these (in my experience, usually state or federal) funding agencies require. It can take a full-time, trained staff to apply for this money, not to mention process it when it arrives and account for it when it has been spent.20 As the fiscal agent I found myself in the awkward position of facilitating payment to the organization: ERICA, December 2002: It has taken my university more than seven weeks to cut a check for the community organizations that led this project. At week six when the three-figure check had still not been issued, one of the community organizations called me—politely— to ask about the status of the money. After a half-day of trouping through the varied offices, I find the paperwork, stalled, due to a memo error. I am furious and there is no one but myself to blame. Reimbursement at a state university where every requisition needs to be signed by four individuals is a laborious procedure. Through this work I became familiar with the women who work in the budgets office with no windows, who have no power to alter the arcane reimbursement structure: forms in quadruplicate, crafted in a pretechnology era. I get the four signatures for every reimbursement form and the community organizations get the checks— weeks, maybe months later. My university is a decidedly poor urban institution with a mission of access and excellence and a commitment to serving the community. Our mission states: “Unique to Northeastern’s mission are the two distinctive features of diversity and community partnerships” (www.neiu.edu/Mission.htm). Although I had encountered issues bringing community-based organizations into the university before (poor turnout for events, inability to acquire the minutia necessary to facilitate the engagement, such as honoraria, parking passes, etc), I had not seriously investigated the channels of my own institution that would facilitate the reimbursement. I signed on to the collaboration, seduced by coffee and conversations, and I thought I had skills to broker this project. While as much as I desire the university to be able to fulfill its mission, I do not expect an institutional shift. Working on the 30 Days project illustrated to me the need to possess a deeper awareness of my own location in order to be a more useful collaborator and the need to be able to place myself in a position of power in order to adequately leverage resources. Maneuvering to place myself in a position of power seems to require viewing myself not as a fringe entity at my university (a position I am happy to inhabit) and risking, of course, the seduction of the comfort that nonfringe positionality may afford. Negotiating

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this transition and remaining connected to the “grassroots” appears to pose a nonunique quandary. How grassroots can one be if ensconced comfortably in the university? What are the costs of these moves? Am I even able to maneuver to place myself in a position of relative “power” at the university? Participation in this project has also directly impacted my own perceptions of my material context and my marginalization. Although I may indeed be a “small fish” within my institution or department, I still have access to resources both through the institution directly and because of my affiliation. ERICA, September 2002: I am at a meeting of a consortium of community organizations that is planning an event on a next-to-nothing budget. I am the only person in the room that has a full-time university gig. We are trying to figure out how to offer a few of the artists who are donating their labor and work a small stipend: $100 for their time. Someone at the table turns to me and says—can’t your university kick in a few dollars, Erica? I laugh and say that my photocopying budget has been eliminated and they might start charging me for my office space. I know that I have been too flippant. Someone rolls their eyes at my joke. While I do have the feeling of being on the edges at my decidedly poor urban university, I am rather unconscious of some the privileges I possess. Salome suggests that this ignorance might be partially a product of the lack of understanding of the locations of work: SALOME: There is fierce competition among grassroots organizations for the very tiny amount of funding available. In university spaces, where people feel that resources are very scarce, they are still living in a very protected environment even if there is a lot of pressure from budget. I don’t think they really understand what scarce resources are. The power that university-based personnel possess is not just monetary power or access to material resources but, as Salome states, the power that arrives with the backing of a legitimate institutional apparatus and the power that comes from having a job with a health-care plan, a pension, and more. SALOME: I work 6 days a week. Long hours for very little money. I am barely supporting myself and a daughter. My mother is always harassing me—why don’t you just give yourself a raise? I have got to work twice as hard, then, to raise the money. It is not worth it.

INTIMATE CONCLUSIONS While I clearly cannot generalize from my own experiences, thinking through this chapter leads me to wonder if “we” university-based activists have investments in maintaining a kind of willful ignorance about our own locations and those of our community partners? Salome suggests that

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academics often possess romantic visions of those that work outside the academy in community organizations. SALOME: I think people in the academy often tend to fantasize about people who work in community organizations, that we are part of this great supportive community. They see us as members of the masses, kept in the bosom of this great family and, you know, it is not true. Perhaps, some of the conflicts that routinely arise in universitycommunity collaborations are as a result of this lore of the good hard work that must be done to further the struggle (often a rather gendered and racialized conceptualization of coalition work). Perhaps part of the tensions arrive from the investments possessed, in the borders between community and university spaces, as fictionally material as they may be. From working on these projects, I have been moved, rather awkwardly at times, to learn and to know the material conditions of my context and the contexts of the community partners with whom I collaborate. I have also been pushed to think through the epistemologic location for my work: what understanding of “research” do I possess? What is my disciplinary affiliation and what are the blindspots? What is my “locus of enunciation” and how do I shift this? I have learned and moved because my practices and my positionality have been reflected back to me and because I have worked in community with others. As a result of these intense collaborations, I too fall in a kind of love with the people I work with, to misquote Salome. My activism moves me into kinds of relationships that academia discourages, prohibits, and actively disqualifies. As TuhiwaiSmith writes, “Most research methodologies assume that the researcher is an outsider able to observe without being implicated in the scene” (1999, 137). Relationships implicate me and change the axis of research. This intimacy creates an incentive for me to investigate my own location, to be better prepared to navigate it on behalf of partners. This intimacy pushes me to want to know my blindspots and my weakness, because I want to avoid the betrayal that I know is around the corner. This intimacy makes me be careful with the ways I talk about the high school project. This intimacy makes me desire solicitations of research from academic bodies who will do the good work, the real work, and the everyday work that is often a quiet failure. Frye suggests that this shift is the move from an arrogant eye to a loving eye: The loving eye is the contrary to the arrogant eye…. It is the eye of one who knows that to know the seen, one must consult something other than one’s own will and interests and fears and imagination. One must look at the thing. One must look and listen and check and question. (1983, 75)

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As metaphor for navigating the boundaries of community and university activist work, love or even intimacy does not work. Chela Sandoval’s (2000) engaging discussion of the revolutionary nature of prophetic love aside, I am not certain that this is a story I want to universalize. Affect can be flighty, dangerous, and even annihilating. Colonialism, “domestic” violence, “charity,” and too many other abhorrent practices are rationalized and rendered neutral or invisible with and through affect. In addition, as Lugones writes, it is seductively easy for those who travel to assume intimacy when they are merely tourists in someone else’s world: Knowing other women’s “worlds” is part of knowing them and knowing them is part of loving them. Notice that the knowing can be done in greater depth or lesser depth, as can the loving. Traveling to another’s “world” is not the same as becoming intimate with them. Intimacy is constituted by a very deep knowledge of the other self. “World” traveling is only part of the process of coming to have this knowledge. (2003, 97) I don’t presume to know enough to possess a “deep knowledge” of these Others I construct in this chapter—the participants in my high school program, Salome, Roberto, the mythic community activist figure, and more—but I have learned, been affected, in ways that have moved me to try, if not to be a more competent knower, then to see and use my limitations more tactically and to, perhaps more important, shift my practice and my axis of to whom I am accountable for my work. NOTES 1. This paper has benefited from feedback from Tim Barnett, Salome Chasnoff, Suzanne de Castell, Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, and Laurie Fuller and conversations with Mary Hermes, Leslie Bloom, and Layli Phillips. Any errors (and the vanities) are clearly all mine. From Angela Davis I get the term “prison industrial complex” (PIC) throughout this chapter (Davis 1998, 1999, 2000). PIC refers to a multifaceted structure in the United States: the increasing privatization of prisons and the contracting out of prison labor for less than $8 a month for a 40-hour work week (Rojas 1998); the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers’ union; the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry (Mauer 1999); the “drug war” in the United States; the legacy of white supremacy in the United States; and more. 2. I use the term “community” with hesitation as I have moved to deeply interrogate its use. Frequently “community” is used to imply conformity and consistency where there is none. Naples (2003) offers a useful discussion of this term, suggesting from her ethnographic work that terms such as “insider,” “outsider” and “community” need to be interrogated. Naples writes: “the mythic construction of a gemeinschaft-like ‘Community’ fed into the outsider phenomenon. The idealized construction

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of what it meant to be a part of the ‘community’ and of who were ‘legitimate’ community members served as both an internalized and externalized means of social control” (2003, 57). Tuhiwai-Smith also writes: “defining community-based research is as complex as defining community” (1999, 126). 3. To construct an opposition between communities and universities is both false and real; false as university-based researchers are lived actors with social histories and standpoints in varied communities, imagined and material; real because an affiliation with a university does provide one with privileges. As this chapter addresses in later sections, significant differences translate into cultural and economic capital: job security, health and employment benefits, institutional privileges that arrive with an affiliation and legitimacy, and more. I use these as two separate categories, “community-based” and “university-based,” to signify these material differences in home locations. 4. I borrow the term “arrogant perception” from Marilyn Frye’s The Politics of Reality (1983). 5. As part of a larger project, in 2002 I started interviewing organizers and activists in the Chicago region, in particular those with whom I have collaborated on varied local justice-oriented projects. The interviews cited in this paper took place in the spring of 2003. 6. Cuomo writes: “All queers are truth-tellers about sexuality, and that is what makes us so threatening to maintainers of the gendered (raced and classed) status quo. (Of course this does not mean that queers are particularly honest)” (2003, 122). 7. Naples (2003) offered me an opportunity to rethink the possibilities of Dorothy Smith’s materialist feminist toolkit. 8. Due to the constraints and the focus of this chapter, I offer only a brief description of both projects. For a more detailed description of the high school and a “do-it-yourself” kit for starting a similar project, refer to Meiners’ (2004) “Uneasy Locations” and look at the www.beyondmedia.org for information on (or to rent or support) 30 Days of Art and Education on Women’s Incarceration. 9. To protect the confidentiality of participants in this program, I do not name the program. In addition, I elect to use the term “formerly incarcerated.” Formerly incarcerated men and women might identify different terms: former or exdetainees, prisoners, convicts, offenders, and so on. Of course, the participants in this program are more than formerly incarcerated men and women. They are also parents, members of diverse faith communities, workers, siblings, lovers, students, and more. 10. The flourishing prison industrial complex in the United States disproportionately impacts poor people and people of color. An editorial in the New York Times, “Two Million and Counting” states: “The population of the nation’s jails and prisons passed two million last year, for the first time in history. The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and one that falls unevenly. An estimated 12% of all African American males between 20–34 are behind bars, more than seven times the rate for white men of the same age. Our overflowing jails and prisons come at a high price, in dollars and in wasted lives” (New York Times, April 9, 2003, A20). Services for those exiting the prison system are deeply needed. In Illinois (like most of the United States) few services are available to support individuals when they are released from prison. “When inmates

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walk away from a state prison in Illinois, they are given $10, a set of street clothes and a one-way bus or train ticket to some approved destination” (The Economist, August 16 2002, 26). 11. Participants have all the difficulties “mainstream” students possess: employment and financial difficulties, family/children’s health issues, transportation constraints. In addition, they possess issues that are specific to a formerly incarcerated population: a parole officer who will not issue movement for a participant to attend the school, court-mandated attendance in rehabilitation programs that often conflict with class times, extreme poverty with seriously restricted employment possibilities, severe health (including dental) problems due to years of neglect while incarcerated, and more. Failure to attend classes (often because of these issues) is the number-one reason students do not complete the program. 12. Specifically I have elected to create a do-it-yourself kit that works to document how university-based activists can start a program related to this, and I have presented work on issues related to recidivism and education, and the representations of the PIC in popular culture. I have been careful over the past few years to not “do research” on the participants in any of my programs. Partially I worry that there is enough data on those ex/incarcerated and not enough research on how the mainstream makes sense of this data. 13. I work not to demonize: constructing academics as the evil entity in opposition to the good community workers is not my goal. 14. Our program continually needs volunteer tutors and teachers, and university-based faculty members have supported us by providing/encouraging/requiring their university students to participate, on an infrequent basis, through offering internships or academic credit to their students. Many of the teachers in this program are also university-based educators. 15. See, for example, Lather, Getting Smart (1991); Gluck and Patai, Women’s Words (1991); Viseswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (1994); Behar and Gordon, Women Writing Cultures (1995); de Castell and Bryson “From the Ridiculous to the Sublime” (1998); Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (1999). 16. Does it compromise the research process to have the researcher be a biased advocate for her research subjects; inversely, does a feminist researcher still get to keep her feminist card if she goes into the field to identify a problem and does not work to change the contexts, as queried by Stacey in her 1988 essay “Can There Be Feminist Ethnography?” Many scholar/activists of color deepened this dialogue to highlight the active distrust many communities of color have with the paradigm of “research” altogether, as the opening preface of Tuhiwai-Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies notes: “The term ‘research’ is inextricably connected to imperialism and colonialism” (1999, 1). 17. I clearly move into generalizations because, although some have offered the land-scape or components of the field, such as Pinar and colleagues (1995) and Martusewicz and Reynolds (1994), fields of intellectual inquiry, as these authors acknowledge, are dynamic and drawing boundaries is subjective work. 18. Stacey makes this reference in her analysis of the fragile boundaries between the social science disciplines (specifically between anthropology and sociology).

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19. Perhaps this interdisciplinary or transdiscplinary nature of educational studies also has the possibility to expose the constructedness and underpinnings of disciplinary ways of knowing. 20. See Ford-Smith (1997) for an interesting discussion of how funding sources impact a feminist social-change organization in the Caribbean.

REFERENCES Behar, Ruth, and Deborah Gordon, eds. 1995. Women writing cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press. Critical Resistance Publications Collective. 2000. Issue Overview. Social Justice: A Journal of Crime Conflict and World Order (Special Issue: Critical Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex) 27:1–5. Cuomo, Chris. 2003. The philosopher queen: Feminist essays on war, love and knowledge. Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield. Davis, Angela. 1998. Masked racism: Reflections on the prison industrial complex. Colorlines (Special Section: The Prison Industrial Complex) 1(2). Retrieved March 15, 2003, from the Colorlines website: http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/%20Story1_2_01.html ——. 1999. Prison industrial complex. Audio CD. Alternative Tentacle. (December 14). ——. 2000. From the convict lease system to the super max prison. In States of confinement: Policing, detention and prison, edited by J.James. New York: St. Martin’s Press. de Castell, Suzanne, and Mary Bryson, eds. 1997. Radical in(ter)ventions: Identity, politics, and differences in educational praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press. ——. 1998. From the ridiculous to the sublime: On finding oneself in educational research. In Queer theory in education, edited by W.Pinar. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fine, Michelle. 1997. Witnessing whiteness. In Off-White: Readings on race, power and society, edited by M.Fine, L.Weis, C.L.Powell, and L.Wong. New York: Routledge. Ford-Smith, Honour. 1997. Ring-ding in a tight corner: Sistren, collective democracy and the organization of cultural production. In Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, edited by J.Alexander and C.Mohanty. New York: Routledge. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. New York: The Crossing Press. Gluck, Sherna Berger and Patai, Daphne. 1991. Women’s words: The feminist practice of oral history. New York: Routledge. Haig-Brown, Celia. 1992. Choosing border work. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 19(1):96–116. Hermes, Mary. 2002. Research that works: Native language in a reservation community. Unpublished paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meetings, April, New Orleans, Louisiana. Hoagland, Sarah. 2003. Practices of knowing: Transcendence and denial of epistemic credibility, or Engagement and transformation. International Studies in Philosophy 35(1):21–37.

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Lather, Patti. 1991. Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield. Martusewicz, Rebecca, and William Reynolds. 1994. Inside/out: Contemporary critical perspectives on education. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mauer, Marc. 1999. A race to incarcerate. New York: New Press. Meiners, Erica. 2004, forthcoming. “Uneasy locations: Complexities from the first two years of an adult high school for formerly incarcerated men and women. Race, Ethnicity and Education. Nadar, Laura. 1984. Up the anthropologist. In Reinventing anthropology, edited by D. Hymes. New York: Vintage Books. Naples, Nancy. 2003. Feminism and method: Ethnography, discourse analysis and activist research. New York: Routledge. Pinar, William, William M.Reynolds, Patrick Slattery, and Peter Taubman. 1995. Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York: Peter Lang Pub. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1983. Coalition politics: Turning the century. In Home girls: A black feminist anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Press. Rojas, Paz. 1998. Complex facts. Colorlines (Special Section: The Prison Industrial Complex) 1(2). Retrieved March 15, 2003, from the Colorlines website: http://www.arc.%20org/c_Lines/CLArchives/story1_2_02.html. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stacey, Judith. 1988. Can there be feminist ethnography? Women’s Studies International Forum 11, 163–82. ——. 1999. Ethnography confronts the global village: A new home for a new century? Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28:687–97. A stigma that never fades. 2002. The Economist (August 16): 25–27. Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London & New York: Zed Books. Two million and counting (Editorial). 2003. New York Times (April 9): A20. Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales from the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Visweswaran, Kamela. 1994. Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Woolcott, Harry. 2002. Sneaky kid and its aftermath: Ethics and intimacy in fieldwork. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press.

10 HOW RESEARCH CAN BE MADE TO MEAN Feminist Ethnography at the Limits of Representation Patti Lather From 1992 to 1996, my co-researcher, Chris Smithies, and I were engaged in an ethnography that was published as Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS (Lather and Smithies 1997). As I originally thought of the project, I wanted to bring together three interests. The first was my abiding interest in research as praxis (Lather 1986b). How could such a study contribute to struggles for social justice in a way that would be useful to the study’s participants? This interest mandated a combination of critical ethnography and participatory action research and led to inquiry that was “openly ideological” (Lather 1986a) in its advocacy of support for those with HIV/AIDS and interactive and negotiated in terms of research design. One example of the latter is what I have come to call the most expensive “member check” in the history of qualitative research: we secured funding to desktop publish a preliminary report in the form of a book, which meant that the final edition could include the reactions of the women in the study to our initial effort to write about their lives. My second interest was to contribute to the small pool, at that time, of feminist experimental ethnographies. What would such a text that combined the poesis of the sort of work that James Clifford and George Marcus called for in their 1986 Writing Culture with feminist commitments to social change look like? In this particular case, invited to chronicle stories, my sense of task was to write for a broad public audience, particularly the women participating in the study, but to do so in a way that troubled habitual frames of representational space that too often offered up such women for consumption and voyeurism, a “too easy” eating of the other (hooks 1992). The third interest that propelled the study was my investment in empirical work as a site to learn how to find our way into postfoundational possibilities. The closeness that fieldwork allows to the practical ways that people enact their lives confronts us with the stubborn materiality of others, in this case the complicated experiences of living with HIV/AIDS. Moving across levels of the particular and the abstract, Chris and I were constrained in our interpretive “will to know” by the very positivities that cannot be exhausted by us, the otherness that always

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exceeds us, in a way that foregrounds the limits and necessary misfirings of any effort to tell stories that belong to others. Here, placed outside of mastery and victory narratives, ethnography became a kind of selfwounding laboratory for discovering the rules by which truth is produced.1 In thinking about the work of advocacy in this, what is lost and found, settled and unsettled, done and undone; where does the meaning to what we do come from; how are such meanings related to social and cultural issues, to history and the conventions of our practices? Foley (1998) notes how the dominance of scientific realism dies hard (111). Textually, scientificity is created by means of the absent author who speaks in the detached, measured tones of third-person address; the behind-the-scenes editor who presents closely edited snippets from native voices; and the all-knowing interpretive voice of the researcher who compares and classifies. In contrast with this is the critical realism of openly ideological ethnography with its didactic, often “morally indignant” tone that produces a sort of “socialist realist tract” (Foley 1998, 112). Characterized by theory-driven analysis, “strong knowledge claims” are intended to reveal the driving forces of history via a deep reading of structural determinants. Unlike the dispassionate scientist, here we have the heroic engaged author and passionate social critic who unmasks the hidden real at work in social inequality. Troubling the Angels advocates neither of these. Particularly interested in what feminist knowledge projects that work within and against identity categories, visibility politics, and the romance of voice might look like, it stages a set of anxieties that haunts feminist ethnography. Assembling a set of practices that includes decentering authorial voice via relatively unmediated participant voices, authorial confession, autobiography, “epistemological laments” (Foley 1998, 120), and participant response data, it disrupts its own truth claims. Such a text offers situated, partial knowledge via a movement toward the sort of doubled practices that would allow us to neither assume transparent narrative nor override participant meaning frames. This is a discourse analysis that uses the breakdown of meaning and the illusiveness of signification to foster our capacity to notice what Britzman (2000) calls “the vantage of the other” and “the obligation of our own implication,” all that betrays us in the telling as well as that which cannot be said and that which cannot be heard in the saying. As Popkewitz (1998) argues so well, what we like to think of as a “cure” is as often part of a disguised theologism that reduces difference into the same. Our categories and typologies and logics of analyses structure what we see. Postulates, units of study, and interpretive frames are being advocated, whether we recognize them or not. Enlightenment ideals regarding the human capacity to solve social problems through rationalized knowledge undergird our efforts. This is Jacques Derrida’s (1994) thesis of necessary complicity and what Foucault (1980) cautions

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as the invasive stretch of surveillance in the name of the human sciences, regardless of paradigm. Hence the book is situated in the loss of innocence of qualitative research, particularly feminist ethnography (Stacey 1988; Van Maanen 1995). Each of these terms, then, is positioned not as cure but, rather, as offering instructive complications out of a situated inquiry. In this, my experience of the book has been both as a perfect trance of involvement as well as a medium of dislocation, a kind of violation and excess, discontinuous with itself. In a way that is very different from the self-criticism of modernism, I am trying to attend to how the book falls back into what it must refuse. What is its “residual realism” (Foley 1998, 120); its reinscriptions of a philosophy of presence via the “honoring” of voice; its “OzOhio” dimensions of “Chris and Patti skipping down the yellowbrick road to see the wizard, with added angel wings” that “press readers to assent to its argument?”2 What is it “impelled to try to rescue, even when it resists doing that, some ground or principle or platform of action” (Stronbach and MacLure 1997, 7)? In terms of its praxis aspirations, what is at stake in replacing invisibility with visibility in a way that refuses seemingly self-evident, transparent stories as if voices “speak for themselves” (Piontek 2000)? What the women thought of all this is represented in the Epilogue, and suffice it to say they were both “for” and “against” our textual moves. “Whoever thought when we started all of this that it would ever be a book” was the strongest part, for me, of what they said—testimony to the something that was more than nothing of our efforts. But in addressing issues of responsible engagement, was the member check a “structured alibi for consultation” (Spivak 1994, 63) or an effort to speak “to/through” rather than the “position of mastery” of “speaking about” (Picart 1999, 171)? What were the limits as well as possibilities of all of us getting lost: “the women, the researchers, the readers, the angels, in order to open up present frames of knowing to the possibilities of thinking differently” (Lather and Smithies 1997, 52)? As one of my general exam students wrote, “Even with all these words, I know that I am making a career out of them” (Rhee 1999). What can such uses be made to mean? A tension that the study helped me grapple with was that between researcher and researched in terms of the reliable-narrator issue. Committed to honoring both the stories the women told about their lives and the premises of discourse analysis, I suggest that, within the interpretive paradigm, we assume both researcher and researched as reliable narrators, with the researcher as privileged knower via grounded and/or a priori theorizing. Within the critical paradigm, the assumption is of an unreliable narrator caught up in false consciousness and a reliable researcher in an usurpative relationship to stories of lived experience. Contrary to both the interpretive and critical paradigms, within our project we deconstructively assumed both researcher and researched as unreliable narrators given the indeterminacies of language and the workings of power in the will to know. Hence our focus was on narrative and voice as

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limits and the possibilities of interruptive textual practices that work out of the familiar but that twist queer cross-codes in order to foreground how we are, in Foucault’s (1988) words, “freer than we feel” (10) within our sedimentations and disciplinary practices. Substituting a theory of deferral for one of essence, the quest for presence is interrupted by detour, delay, and the imposition of radical complications for any story that promises to deliver a message to its proper receiver. Surrendering the claim to any simplicity of presence, Chris and I function as agents of displacement, making representations only to foreground their insufficiencies. We do this in order to resist having the women in our study be consumed without remainder by some sense-making machine. Our task is not so much to unpack something real as to enact the ruins of any effort to monumentalize lived experience. Such reflection on ungraspable meaning is not about ineffability but about how the ambiguities of knowing are the structure of our grasp. This is a kind of failed engagement with the ontological question of the status of the object after poststructuralism. Modulating from argumentative to poetic registers, the book unfolds across a range of voices that stage how nothing can deliver us from our misrecognitions. Such a practice is about the ways we are struck by what we try to understand, are captured by it, and then attempt to grasp the limits and possibilities of our grasp—a dream of science outside mastery and transparency (Melville 1996). Our hope for readers is something other than a reading that can only find what it is looking for: perhaps a reading that surprises; a place where disjunction occurs, obliged by the text to see how we see, out of the overdetermined habits of reading; a reading that is other or more than we should like it to be—always more and other, protean. Purposefully not intelligible within standard frames, it is a book about multiple shifting realities, a stubborn book that rubs against the desire for interpretive mastery and implicates an audience rather than persuade or seduce. CONCLUSION Let us be clear about the political costs of embracing [Nietzsche’s] perspectivism…. [W]e must abandon the quest for a privileged, epistemologically pure, God’seye perspective on the world. We need not disavow our cultural, genealogical, or political preferences for certain perspectives, but we must be careful to situate those preferences within a discernible political agenda. The privilege of a particular perspective will derive

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entirely from its situation within the political agenda it expresses, and not from its internal coherence or privileged access to the real world. (Conway 1997, 132–33)

Situated in the times and places that we have been given to write, I have used Chris and my text as a “good things to think with” in finding a way into a less comfortable social science full of stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of truth, interpretation, and responsibility. My reading of Nietzsche has convinced me that we are still recovering from the lie about the possibilities of the naked truth. My interest is in the science that is possible after the questioning of the ground of science: perhaps a less ascetic, pious science—some sort of “blurred genre” or “leaky narrative” that at this time and place seems monstrous to our ears, ears still attuned to the quest for certainty and foundations. Given demands for practices of knowing with more to answer to in terms of the complexities of language and the world, perhaps what I am advocating, then, is attention to the paradoxes that structure our work. Such attention to the collision of humanist and post-humanist assumptions in efforts to voice and make visible can help us move toward the sort of doubled practices that prompt a rethinking of how research-based knowledge remains possible given the end of the value-free notion of science and the resultant troubling of confidence in the scientific project. What I am endorsing is not the skepticism that so worries those invested in a resurgence of traditional warrants of science (e.g., Phillips and Burbules 2000), but the yes of responsibility within possibility as well as necessity of history and what remains to be done. NOTES 1. “Always already” situated in the ambivalent tensions of Western feminist ethnographic traditions of giving voice to the voiceless (Visweswaran 1994), Troubling the Angels is largely about philosophical argument, rhetoric, typography, and ethnographic voice. Chris and I deal with this through such textual practices as a horizontally split text where the women’s words are on the top of the page in a larger font and researchers’ narratives are on the bottom in a smaller font. Most pages combine a top two-thirds that appears to be unmediated interview transcripts that foreground insider stories and a bottom under-writing that both decenters and constructs authorial “presence” through a kind of temporal disturbance. By forcing a reading in two directions, such a textual display is designed to break the realist frame. 2. Elliot Mishler, private correspondence, November 1996. Mishler’s point is not unlike that of dance critic Arlene Croce, regarding Bill T.Jones, when she writes of how a nonbelievers perspective is denied legitimacy regarding “oppression” art that offers the dissatisfied reader no desirable subject position.

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REFERENCES Britzman, Deborah. 1997. The tangles of implication. Qualitative Studies in Education. 10(1):31–37. ——. 2002. If the story cannot end. In Between hope and despair, edited by Roger Simon, S.Rosenberg, and C.Eppert. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conway, Daniel. 1997. Nietzsche and the political. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Foley, Douglas. 1998. On writing reflexive realist narratives. In Being reflexive in critical educational and social research, edited by G.Shacklock and J.Smyth. London: Falmer Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected interveiws and other writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordone. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault Edited by Luther H.Martin, Jack Gutman and Patrick H.Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fuss, Diane. 1996. Look who’s talking, or If looks could kill. Critical Inquiry 22(2): 383–92. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. hooks, bell. 1992. Eating the other: Desire and resistance. In Black looks: Race and representation, edited by b.hooks. Boston: South End Press. Lather, Patti. 1986a. Issues of validity in openly ideological research: Between a rock and soft place. Interchange 17(4):63–84. ——. 1986b. Research as praxis. Harvard Educational Review 56 (3):257–77. Lather, Patti and Chris Smithies. 1997. Troubling the angels: Women living with HIV/AIDS. Boulder: Westview Press. Melville, Steven. 1996. Color has not yet been named: Objectivity in deconstruction. Seams: Art as a philosophical context: Essays by Steven Melville. Edited by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Amsterdam: G&B Arts. Phillips, D.C., and Nicholas Burbules. 2000. Postpositivism and educational research. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Picart, Caroline Joan. 1999. Resentment and the “feminine” in Nietzsche’s politico-aesthetics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Piontek, Thomas, 2000. Language and power in postmodern ethnography: Representing women with HIV/AIDS. Hybrid spaces: Theory, culture, economy, ed. Johannes Angermuller, Katharina Bunzmann, and Christina Rauch. Hamburg, Germany: LIT. Popkewitz, Thomas. 1998. The culture of redemption and the administration of freedom. Review of Educational Research, 65(1), 1–34. Rhee, Jeong Eun. 1999. Qualifying examination, Ohio State University, November. Sommer, Doris. 1994. Resistant texts and incompetent readers. Poetics Today 15(4): 523–51. Spivak, Gayatri. 1994. Responsibility. boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, 21(3), 19–64.

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Stronach, Ian and Maggie MacLure. 1997. Educational research undone: The postmodern embrace. Buckingham: Open University Press. Stacey, Judith. 1988. Can there be a feminist ethnography? Women’s Studies International Forum 11:163–82. Van Maanen, John. 1995. An end to innocence: The ethnography of ethnography. In Representation in ethnography, edited by J.Van Maanen. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

11 HOW NEW YORKERS SAID NO TO WAR A Play about Theory and Action Chris Cuomo Indeed some of us did not die. Some of you, some of us remain, despite that hatred that violence that murder that suicide that affront to our notions of civilized days and nights. And what shall we do, we who did not die? What shall we do now? —June Jordan, San Francisco, November 20011 WHY IS THERE ALWAYS MONEY FOR WAR, BUT NOT FOR EDUCATION? —Bumper sticker, seen on an Indiana highway, 2003 SUBJECT: Apparently no one had planned it that way, but the September 11 attacks on the United States sparked a new and powerful global movement for peace and justice. In New York City, the peace impulse emerged before the air even began to clear. I know because I was there. I felt it, and I was not alone. TV SCREEN: Crash! Crash! Crash! Crash!…[repeat to fade] MYRRHINA: Breath is our deepest relation with the world. Every breath is a gulp of particulate matter. Their bodies turned to dust. That night black powder glittered in the street light. If it is small enough it lands in your lungs. I asked for a visit from peaceful spirits. I. PRAYING FOR PEACE TV SCREEN: “A Proclamation: Civilized people around the world denounce the evildoers who devised and executed these terrible attacks. Justice demands that those who helped or harbored the ter rorists be punished—and punished severely. The enormity of their evil demands it. We will use all the resources of the United States and our cooperating friends and allies to pursue those responsible for this evil, until justice is done.

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“We mourn with those who have suffered great and disastrous loss. All our hearts have been seared by the sudden and senseless taking of innocent lives. We pray for healing and for the strength to serve and encourage one another in hope and faith. “Scripture says: ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.’ I call on every American family and the family of America to observe a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, honoring the memory of the thousands of victims of these brutal attacks and comforting those who lost loved ones. We will persevere through this national tragedy and personal loss. In time, we will find healing and recovery; and, in the face of all this evil, we remain strong and united, ‘one Nation under God.’ “Now, therefore, I, George W.Bush, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Friday, September 14, 2001, as a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001. I ask that the people of the United States and places of worship mark this National Day of Prayer and Remembrance with noontime memorial services, the ringing of bells at that hour, and evening candlelight remembrance vigils. I encourage employers to permit their workers time off during the lunch hour to attend the noontime services to pray for our land. I invite the people of the world who share our grief to join us in these solemn observances. “In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this thirteenth day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-sixth.”2 MYRRHINA: Floating ash is everywhere these days. I wanted to pray for this land too, so I stepped into the concrete dusk, a handmade sign duct-taped to the front and the back of my hoodie: Great Minds Agree: Peace Is Possible: Jesus, Lao-tzu, Barbara Deming, Martin Luther King. Downtown sidewalks filled with clusters of people, candles in hand, heading for parks or street corners. Three days after the Twin Towers fell, the city still felt completely surreal Even in the dirty atmosphere, the people were unusually electrified and visible. Present. It felt like everyone mattered. When I got to Union Square I saw other homemade signs: Fight Back America, An Eye for an Eye Makes Everyone Blind, I’m Hungry and Need Money for Food. Someone was talking through a bullhorn but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then she started to sing, “All we are saying is give peace a chance!” BROTHER: I’m no Republican, but to me knee-jerk pacifism can be as annoying as knee-jerk militarism. A military response was clearly necessary. In the wake of that kind of slaughter, singing give peace a chance seemed as silly as thinking that we’d solve the problem by nuking Afghanistan.

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Kol Nidre on the cello, something beautiful and sad would have been nice. I just needed a good cry, and to be out among people and away from the TV. The last thing I felt like doing was singing. But when someone in another corner of the park started chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!”—like this was some sort of hockey game—I had to join the woman on the bullhorn. A friend said the chanters must have come in from Jersey or Long Island—I mean, this is Greenwich Village! But I knew the ghosts were on our side. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory strikers, anti-lynching crusaders, suffragists, Queer Nations…. I’ve got a picture on the wall of my office of Emma Goldman delivering a speech in Union Square in 1916. She’s standing on the seat of a great old convertible, screaming to a crowd of men in bowler hats and boaters about the importance of birth control, her chest heaving, her hair coming out of its pins. I thought about Emma, how she managed to stay so hopeful And I thought about the massive vigil held in Union Square to protest the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, in June of 1953. What prayers were offered up on that night? What song would have been the right song to sing? When the crowd started to disperse, you could see that the park had become a garden of candles and shrines. Piles of flowers, bodega candles, and tchotchkes were scattered all along the sidewalk, zigzagging oddly through the square. Homemade fliers were posted everywhere, color photocopy faces of loved ones lost, flimsy paper hopes for miracles. We walked along, regular people looking at photos, awkward with incredulity and worry, all the while thinking about death. Nearly everyone was crying, it seemed, crying or holding back tears. What I sensed in the air was—just tremendous sadness. More like a head-shaking “How could this be?” than “Let’s go to war!” I left Union Square fighting despair…groups like the Taliban, corporate greed, American apathy, the vulnerability of the human body…. It all seemed to point toward nauseating conclusions. My own tears felt like a plea for deliverance from some awful inevitability. MYRRHINA: A plea for deliverance from evil can become a decision to strengthen the good. Desires for better alternatives can become movement toward those alternatives. Ever since September 11 I had felt alienated and strange. I didn’t know where to get reliable information, and I was frightened about what was going to happen next. At least now I could see that I wasn’t alone. I know what everyone saw on TV, the enthusiasm for revenge or whatever. But that was not the only American response. No. Just a couple of miles north of ground zero, the National Day of Prayer closed with the singers occupying Union Square. TV SCREEN: The following morning, a letter from the parents of a young man who had worked in one of the towers appeared in the Saturday New York Times: “Our son is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack…. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news

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about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands, dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son’s death. Not in our son’s name. Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times.”3 BROTHER: For me, it was too soon to know what to think. And in the midst of a crisis it is sometimes best to trust protocol, rather than start screaming about injustice right away. I’m afraid there is a socially constituted need for revenge. America took a tremendous hit as a superpower and a nation. And the people in those planes, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and their families—they all suffered horribly. Someone had to be punished. Our global sense of decency was shattered by a bunch of stupid men who hate us, puppets for other greedy evil men. America has fatal weaknesses, it’s true, but that is actually beside the point here. I’d rather live under this country’s imperial power than anywhere else. The real America the Beautiful is worth fighting for, and I want us to stay strong. Human decency demands a military response to this sort of slaughter. And sometimes more blood must be shed to bring something better. LEAFY SEADRAGON: Ouch! BROTHER: What, do you think you can change things? You’re not going to change anything. IRIS-EYE: Please stop being so absolute. Change is an unpredictable process, not a vector. And for mortal beings, change is inevitable. Why don’t you get involved before you decide that nothing can change! It’s the human will that creates such difficulties. I did have a personal moment of truth, probably because I identified so strongly with the victims. I don’t think of myself as much of a capitalist, or even a patriotic American. I mean, I’m just…. But I could have been in those towers that morning. That could have been any of us. I thought about that a lot—too much, maybe. But when I did…. I just felt very glad to be alive. I got in touch with fear, yes, but I also felt deeply my love of life, and the people I love, and appreciation for the world around me. I realized that if I were killed like that, I would not want my death to be in vain. I would want to think: At least my dying helped make the world a better place. I know I’m not representative. In my own cynical moments, I wish I could kill the bad guys myself, believe me. If I had felt that I really knew who to blame, I might have been in favor of violence, too. I don’t want to judge other peoples’ responses. I was lucky I didn’t lose anyone, and we were okay.

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What I was really panicked about was what the U.S. government would do. It was our country’s most chilling hour, and I didn’t trust our own leaders one bit. Even those of us who would have loved to make the Taliban disappear from the face of the earth were worried about the directions the Bush administration was likely to take. And anyway, you can’t make an ideology disappear by bombing it—don’t we know that by now? A couple of days later I got an email about a petition opposing Washington’s “blanket endorsement of undefined and unrestricted violence in the name of counter-terrorism.” That was how I got involved. XÉ: “We the undersigned New Yorkers, many of whom have suffered tremendous loss as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center, are against war…. Strong and decisive measures are called for in this instance, but both the aims and the consequences of any action must be carefully considered…. Here at ‘ground-zero,’ we are as sad and as angry as anyone can be over what has happened. And yet we feel that the memory of those who lost their lives in New York, and the spirit of New York City—so strong in this test of endurance—would be best honored by action designed to break the cycle of violence and strengthen protection for innocent and vulnerable people everywhere…. War will only escalate violence and further undermine our safety and security…. Please do not kill more innocent people in our name. We have suffered enough violence for a lifetime.”4 [TV SCREEN: laughs, then goes silent] Sometimes when something horrible happens, it’s like a magical door gets opened, and things that were previously impossible suddenly seem totally possible. MYRRHINA: I have never felt anything like this before. I’m scared to death. I’m energized with urgency and I cannot seem to stop crying. I am almost constantly worried about my own health and safety. Were we poisoned in some way we’re not yet aware of? I can’t seem to stop looking at the big picture and I feel ready to spring into action. IRIS-EYE: Oh my, it certainly is difficult in times like this to know what to do. Dear me, I certainly don’t know what to think about all of this. What a terrific mess this is. What do you think? What shall we do? XÉ: We have responsibilities to stand up alongside the righteous, and against what is absolutely bad: Violence. Suicide bombers’ insane disregard for human life. Dangerous fictions about the innocence of the privileged. Economic imperialism. Sexism, xenophobia, and fundamentalism everywhere they occur. Governments marching toward war, and trampling on our precious and hard-won civil liberties. Harassment of immigrants and people of color all over the country…. IRIS-EYE: All over the world.

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LEAFY SEADRAGON: And what about the world? The green it all swims in? XÉ: It’s all connected! BROTHER: [bored] Like the values that produce wealth for some lead to the exploitation of others? Or, the principles that allow us to control nature through technology and science—to treat the natural world so badly—are the same principles that allow the suicide bomber to think of me as a means to his own ends, just another thing to be used or destroyed, to suit his goals? Or do you mean that what my society values economically, like a massive military, feeds not only values but also the development of certain tools, like computers and airplanes, that enable people with stupid ideas to do absolutely horrible things? MYRRHINA: Any suicidal murderer can employ the deadliest technology available to him or her, to a profoundly violent effect. That is why selfhating or mean-spirited groups of intelligent beings is such a terrible development, whenever, wherever it occurs. LEAFY SEADRAGON: How can our tribes fight that kind of power? MYRRHINA: This all proves the global importance of mental, spiritual, and ecological health. Knowledge alone is not the key to everything. BROTHER: Wait a second. I don’t even know who the enemy is anymore. Can there really be so many bad guys? XÉ: This isn’t about good guys and bad guys. We all need to maximize flourishing and minimize weapons building. We need to be caring and open to change. IRIS-EYE: It all just seems so hopeless. With so much brainwashing going on, I don’t see how we can have an effect. That gang does control almost everything, and they have endless resources at their disposal. TV SCREEN: Right you are! MYRRHINA: Don’t infer too much from what the TV tells you. They do have a lot of money, but we’re not poor. And, anyway, the world is more complex than that. There is a huge network of people who are asking these same questions, who are not afraid to disagree. They are eating dinner together, going to the movies, talking to each other. Even now, they are making their own experiments, trying to push things along. There is not one American mind, one American way. Good heavens! There are other cultures out there, and many communities where people would rather work for peaceful, happy lives. IRIS-EYE: But I can’t see them. MYRRHINA: You have to know where to look. You have to be able to see. XÉ: There is almost nothing new about this struggle. It felt like we were learning important new lessons every day. BROTHER: This just may be a good time to have a positive influence. Big decisions are being made, people are a little more open than usual,

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and we do have new power. It’s amazing what people are doing with the phone lines. IRIS-EYE: This is about standing up for what is right. XÉ: It’s about action and education. MYRRHINA: This is about global harm reduction and planetary flourishing. Does it all sounds a bit overblown and self-important, a little cluster of people on a mission to save the planet? What can I say—I just feel better when I’m doing something. And the time was ripe for making the most of the situation at hand. [Loud sound creates a break in the action] II. ACTION MODEL BROTHER: They are dogmatic! Mercenary! Perjurious! I cannot stand for this! MYRRHINA: We’ve got to connect with others, to get our voices out there. We can encourage people to be more critical. This is still a democracy, and we’ve got all the right tools at our disposal. We just need to find ways to get people the information they need to become more effectively engaged. BROTHER: Are you assuming people will make better decisions if they have better information? LEAFY SEADRAGON: Things are getting so scary…and so filthy! IRIS-EYE: Come now, we’ve got to get a plan! XÉ: Then we are decided. MYRRHINA: We invite everyone to join us, and we will begin by meeting every Tuesday evening. ALL TOGETHER: Proclamation: On this day, in this place, we pledge to bring something useful into being together. To work for peace, to learn, teach, and ask questions, and to do so artfully and with integrity. To gather people and ideas and talents. To make our views known to the lawmakers. To create positive change and good effects here and now, to be kind and respectful to each other and ourselves in the process, and to come to the work with an appropriate sense of urgency. Our heart chakras had been blasted open, and the government’s enthusiasm for military solutions was making us sick. But we were energized by our work and our connections with each other. We were forming a new community and creating political action. And even though we included a wide range of activists—from people who had been only marginally politically active before to influential veteran politicos—we were lucky. We had an overabundance of good energy and enthusiastic participation from people who knew how to get things done. After only three meetings, we had a Website—http://www.nysaynotowar.org/—an extensive email list, and an excellent logo and t-shirt design. We named ourselves New Yorkers Say No to War—a great sound byte, a message from ground zero, and a direct command. We consciously

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wanted to cash in on the many meanings of “New Yorker” to present ourselves as both cutting edge and mainstream-local. And we wanted a name that invited everyone with an affinity for our mission and our homeplace to join us.5 Much of our organizing and communications happened over the Internet, and the committee who planned and arranged weekly meetings (sometimes as many as a dozen people, sometimes as few as three) met in person on Sunday afternoons. Tuesday night meetings of sixty or so people were seminars on topics we felt we needed to know more about in order to be more politically informed and effective. And every meeting began with a presentation of art. The political situation was very complex, so we hosted panels and discussions on a wide range of topics: Afghanistan, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Iraq, media activism, women and war, the psychology of violence, the USA PATRIOT Act, nonviolent resistance, black and latino responses to the war, immigrants’ rights, spirituality and working for peace. We invited speakers from various organizations—the Center for Constitutional Rights, the World Conference on Religion and Peace, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, Uptown Youth for Peace and Justice—and folks in the group gave presentations and shared creative work. We were regular people, professionals mostly, and we shared certain values—we were worldly, feminist, and pretty class conscious. We were good-hearted, gay-friendly, and diverse. We were committed to positive change. At first many of us seemed interested in direct action—protests, ACT-UP-style media activism, civil disobedience, sexy high-profile events. But in the early days of “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” it was nearly impossible to get media attention on dissent. And the political situation was changing so rapidly, it wasn’t easy to come up with a message that had any staying power. We did participate in protests, including October’s first demonstrations against the INS detention of immigrants, organized by Arab-American families in Brooklyn. Right away, our group grew stronger and more diverse by supporting the work of other organizations. Several people focused on art and media activism. One gal plastered the city with red and blue posters that said, Be Patriotic: Nationalize Health Care. Another cluster organized a campaign against stupid shopping, complete with lovely girl-power graphics. Still, we didn’t quite become the rocking direct-action group some of us longed to be. Back when the United States of America was bombing Afghanistan it was difficult to build much momentum on the streets against the Bush administration’s fury for war. What really worked for us was the consistency and the quality of the Tuesday night forums, our regular email contact, and the fact that we were nonpartisan. The meetings provided information, art, and discussion on pertinent topics, and space for networking, organizing, and even

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performing and promoting our own work. The people involved were incredibly dedicated and well connected. Although the high-powered nature of the group could be intimidating, generally the vibe was very accepting and friendly, people were nice, and anyone who showed up was welcomed. Of course it didn’t hurt that it was mostly women running the show. BROTHER: People who weren’t into meetings could stay connected via email or the Web site, and tap in according to their own preferences. We created an informed, informal network that could be easily activated, and our network continued to grow. We also had affinity for each other. We had a fair amount in common, and perhaps because most of us had gotten to know each other in the wake of a tragedy, our connections felt very warm and supportive. We almost always went out for cocktails or to get something to eat after meetings. Of course everything was not always rosy. The forum on Israel and Palestine erupted into a screaming match, with bad feelings on every side. But the next week we came back again and continued the conversation in a very open and honest way. It was really pretty amazing.6 IRIS-EYE: I was feeling adrift, because I just did not know what to read. I was obsessively listening to Spearhead and Meredith Monk, but the country seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket, and I needed a book to calm me down. Yet nothing I picked up was very helpful. Every novel seemed dull, and every work of theory was suddenly hopelessly irrelevant. All the books in the world, all the great halls of learning, and how much good have they done? The right people read the right book and agree on the right things in the right way for a while and their lives are lovely and fine or at least a bit interesting. But do books make the world a better place? All that information and insight, and still does human violence triumph in the end? Oh, it was depressing. I wanted a new story. I wanted a new way to think about power. [IRISEYE opens her own book and starts writing] XÉ: I got a lot of comfort out of my daughter’s favorite children’s book: “Little one, whoever you are, wherever you are, there are little ones just like you all over the world….”7 The peace impulse that emerged in New York City after 9/11 created new opportunities to strengthen and build coalitions. Some of us wanted to connect with a wide range of people—especially with more people of color and working-class communities—to help build the grassroots movement for justice and peace. We saw New Yorkers Say No to War as an extension of the work we’d been doing for years, at the intersections of multiple issues. Others were content to keep meeting as we were in Greenwich Village, and were less concerned about our own demographics, or the “race, class, gender, and sexuality” approach to

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politics. Some were uncomfortable with our decision to use the Gay Community Center as our home base. Inevitably some people became less involved with the group. Changed commitments, political disappointments, personality clashes, life. Some people went away feeling badly when their ideas weren’t welcomed with enthusiasm. But there was always a very dedicated and consistent core involved in planning and outreach, and new people kept bringing fresh ideas and enthusiasm. Near the end of 2001 it felt like an act of courage to wear my New Yorkers Say No to War t-shirt on the subway. But in spite of the ubiquitous flag waving and mainstream media’s blackout on dissent, we knew we represented a hidden but huge sector of public opinion. Even people in favor of the war in Afghanistan were worried about where the military mission was going, and about attacks on civil liberties at home. In the lower-income communities that were hit hardest by 9/11, like Chinatown and the Hispanic Lower East Side, people were dealing with disastrous environmental and health effects, including rampant asthma and respiratory problems, and they had begun protesting the government’s responses.8 I was in close touch with family and friends all over, and I knew that almost everywhere there was lingering resentment over the 2000 elections, and lurking panic about what the Bush administration would do next. Still, it wasn’t easy to know how to make our disapproval and our knowledge more visible. TV SCREEN: On December 20, a false tip by an Afghan agent resulted in U.S. warplanes attacking a convoy of vehicles carrying tribal elders to the installation of the new Karzai government in Kabul.9 “Why is this tyranny happening to us?” asked Haji Khyal Khan, a villager who said five members of his family had been killed. In a nearby village bombed in the same offensive, locals picked through the rubble of their homes, retrieving what possessions they could. As he dragged away a tattered carpet, Agha Mohammed told reporters “There were no terrorists. They destroyed a whole village and we’ve lost everything.”10 Between October 7 and December 6, U.S. aerial attacks on Afghanistan had killed an average of 62 innocent civilians a day. The Houston Chronicle estimated that the war in Afghanistan would continue to cost American taxpayers an average of 400 million dollars a month.11 BROTHER: For us, a crucial turning point came in February 2002, when tens of thousands showed up at the Waldorf Astoria to protest the meetings of the World Economic Forum. Before the weekend of actions there was a media-driven panic about whether antiglobalization protesters were likely to damage property, and over the moral appropriateness of rallying in New York so soon after 9/11. But on the day of the protest the streets were filled with banners against war and corporate greed, and people chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” and “No blood for oil!”

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Stars like Bono and Bill Gates were involved in the humanitarian edges of the Forum’s business discussions, so the media coverage was pretty good. Of course those humanitarian edges existed because protesters had completely shut down the meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 2000, bringing world attention to the environmental and human costs of the new global economy. Anyway, I think the people in the media knew we were watching them—maybe some of them even wanted to do a good job. Even mainstream outlets ran substantive stories about the effects of globalization, and portrayed the protesters as compassionate, intelligent, and motivated by solid liberal values.12 The only aggression I saw was police aggression against us—they were pushing kids into barricades and trying to confuse and disperse the crowd. But in the end, the event was mostly very peaceful, and a huge success. Like everyone else, I’ve come to my own conclusions about what marches can accomplish. But I was so psyched to see how many of us were on the streets that day, and who we were. It seemed mostly to be normal New Yorkers, in all our diversity, claiming our democratic right to protest. And the antiwar message was everywhere. We realized that our sense that we represented something much bigger than ourselves was more than just wishful thinking. There were many other networks like ours, many individuals who were fired up and wanting to do something about it. Progressive America seemed to be waking back up. MYRRHINA: New York City is like magnetic north for some of the most creative, successful, and open-minded people on the planet— including many people who have never even been there. In choosing their target, the terrorists inadvertently set in motion a global wave of creative resistance to violence and repression that helped the peace impulse gain strength all over the planet in 2002, against such frightening odds. LEAFY SEADRAGON: What’s so special about the Big Apple? BROTHER: Well, there’s Wall Street, major media outlets, incredible population density, and lots and lots of money moving around…. XÉ: It’s the diversity, and the constant influx of immigrant commu nities. It’s all there, and it’s connected to every place else. The city is the ultimate modern global village. And it always has been. IRIS-EYE: I think it must have something to do with the Iroquois Con federacy and the Hudson River. The personality of the city comes from a stunning and particular intersection of indigenous and local knowledges, economic relationships, and products, art, industry, and ecological potential, all within the swirl of global history… LEAFY SEADRAGON: But isn’t every place like that? [IRIS-EYE hands her book to MYRHINNA. MYRHINNA opens the book and reads the following]: In the fall of 2002, in beautiful Bali, Indonesia, terrorists bombed the Sari Nightclub and a location near the U.S. Consulate General, killing nearly 200 people, including many tourists from Australia. In response to

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those attacks, a few weeks later, tens of thousands of people gathered for a Hindu cleansing ceremony at the site of the attack, wearing t-shirts that said Bali Loves Peace. Promotional materials for the event said the Balinese hoped to “restore the shattered spiritual balance and harmony to their lives and to the island.” People meditated and chanted amid flowers and colorful banners, and aromas of incense and sacrificial meat. They prayed to free the victims’ souls, bless the wounded, forgive the perpetrators, and “restore the microcosmic and macrocosmic balance between the earth, atmosphere and heavens.” In his comments to the press, Jusuf Kalla, the senior government minister in attendance, said “This tragedy is indeed a major catastrophe, but we don’t want to keep crying Bali should be the temple that radiates light.”13 [MYRHINNA kisses book and gives it back to IRIS-EYE] III. RADIATING LIGHT BROTHER: By the first anniversary of 9/11, the economy was going down the tubes, the news was full of stories about corporate scandals, and as part of their war on terrorism the Bush administration was gearing up for a war against Iraq. We wanted to mourn in our own way, but we also wanted to create a spectacle, to let people know that we did not agree with the war march. We wanted to plan an action for Union Square, and D. came up with the idea of the lay-down. I wasn’t in the mood to lie on the ground—I wanted to stand up and shout out the truth. But I was really glad that I trusted the group’s wisdom, because the action was brilliant. It turned out to be something so inspiring and visually effective, something that none of us ever could have anticipated. A couple hundred of us converged on the concrete corner of Union Square between Starbucks and Virgin Records, wearing our “New Yorkers Say No to War” t-shirts. At 8:46, the time the first plane had struck the first tower, someone struck a peace bell, and we lay on the ground in silence. We had hoped for a nice soft spot on the grass, but the city would only give us a permit for this awkward patch of concrete. Still, it was an absolutely gorgeous day, just like a year before. The morning was unusually quiet, and our stage of concrete was actually very visible to the taxis and cars zooming by. We lay there for two hours, reflecting and listening, feeling the pavement and the people alongside us, watching the breeze move the trees. There were other peace-oriented art displays and gatherings all over the park, and this time lots of media was there. We had our “New Yorkers Say No to War” banner, and someone brought a big sign that said “Don’t Trust the Corporate Media.” A few people passed out palm cards and stickers, and our media team did a great job—I think they even got the MTV cameraman to come take a shot of us. The president was doing his thing just a couple of subway stops away, but we knew how many people

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in this city were on our side. We didn’t want to see 9/11 being used to promote war, and we wanted the world to know that the president was not speaking for us. TV SCREEN: On September 12, 2002, American President George Bush addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, directing the nations of the world to either confront the “grave and gathering danger” of Iraq, or to stand aside as the United States and likeminded nations act. Ally put together a “Cabaret on War” that we performed that November. Jay did a rant about what the war march looked like to the Dominican community uptown, Ally sang Brecht’s “Ballad of the Dead Soldier” and I played the president—in stars and stripes boxer shorts— riffing off a Kid Rock song:

My brain’s a rock, you can call me Tex Roll the United Nations with a bottle of Becks Seen a slimmy in a ‘Vette, rolled down my glass And said, “This cut fits right in your tax!” I’ll be waving my colors, blue blood and white In the middle of the night, call me Hoss I’m the boss No remorse for those centuries of slavery You can get it from your daddy, just like me—ha!14 XÉ: We’ll just keep doing our thing. We are going to stop them. [GROUP sound and movement builds the energy] TV SCREEN: The New York Times, February 15, 2003: “Confronting America’s countdown to war, throngs of chanting, placard-waving demonstrators converged on New York and scores of cities across the United States, Europe and Asia today in a global daisy chain of largely peaceful protests against the Bush administration’s threat ened invasion of Iraq. “Millions gathered again today in a mood of impending conflict, forming a patchwork of demonstrations that together, organizers said, made up the largest, most diverse peace protest since the Vietnam War. “On a freezing winter day in New York, a huge crowd, prohibited by a court order from marching, rallied within sight of the United Nations amid heavy security. They raised banners of patriotism and dissent, sounded the hymns of a broad new antiwar movement and heard speakers denounce what they called President Bush’s rush to war…. “There were similar though smaller demonstrations in Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Sacramento, Miami and scores of other American cities, organized under the umbrella of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 120 organizations.

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“In London, 500,000 to 750,000 people rallied in Hyde Park, while 200,000 gathered at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and hundreds of thousands more protested in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, Rome, Melbourne, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Auckland, Seoul, Tokyo and Manila. Many contended that America’s interest in Iraq had more to do with oil than disarming a dangerous tyrant.” [freeze] TV SCREEN: Three days later, when asked about the protests, the American president commented: “Democracy is a beautiful thing, and that people are allowed to express their opinion. I welcome people’s right to say what they believe. Second, evidently some of the world don’t view Saddam Hussein as a risk to peace…you know, size of protest, it’s like deciding, well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.”15 [all but TV SCREEN look at one another with incredulity] IRIS-EYE: Did he say something about a focus group? TV SCREEN: “‘Not a Focus Group’: New York City Council Adopts Resolution Telling Bush to Wait on War,” ABC News, March 12, Dean Schabner reporting. “A short walk away from the site where terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people, the New York City Council voted today to tell President Bush to slow down in his move toward war against Iraq, a war he says is needed to protect America from future attacks.”16 XÉ: “Whereas, The manner in which the United States government is responding to the crisis involving Iraq has caused great con-cern among many New Yorkers, resulting in one of the largest public demonstrations in the history of the City of New York on February 15, 2003; and Whereas, The Council of the City of New York is the locally elected voice of the people of the City of New York; and Whereas, Saddam Hussein has violated United Nations resolutions requiring his government to destroy biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, cease the development of such weapons and permit international inspection of all areas and facilities to ensure compliance with such resolutions; and Whereas…”17 [to fade] We did everything we could, but on March 20, American forces started bombing Baghdad. IV. CONTINUANCE [GROUP movement and sound, big mood transition accompanied by dramatic change in lighting] BROTHER: By the second anniversary of 9/11, after six months of combat, more than 280 American soldiers had been killed and 1200 injured in the Allied war on Iraq.

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XÉ: Were the lives of those soldiers in any way less valuable, less worth saving or mourning, than the lives of the fire fighters who died on 9/11? BROTHER: By September 11, 2003, America had spent more than 73 billion dollars on the war in Iraq, and there was no resolution in sight.18 LEAFY SEADRAGON: Where on Earth did all that money come from? Where did it go? MYRRHINA: She said they’d bombed rubble into dust. IRIS-EYE: Is there any sense in which we are safer or better off today? [Gradual blackout. Warm spotlight on SUBJECT] The sky was as clear as pure happiness again yesterday, just like two years ago, and that gave us all a weird chill. But right there on the street it was just another day, a morning going to work, the church bells were ringing and people were remembering—or not remembering—in their own ways. At 8:46 about forty of us lay down in that same corner of Union Square, wearing our “No to War” t-shirts, and we stayed there again until 10:29, the time when the second tower had collapsed. Several of us handed out palm cards—English on one side and Spanish on the other— explaining our action and inviting people to join us in mourning victims of terror, and victims of wars on terror. We were a presence and a reminder. We were a public meditation for peace. This year our mourning had a different feel. The memories of 9/11 were not so raw, and of course the political context had changed dramatically. I spent part of the time handing out cards, but l did get to lay down for about an hour. I wanted to just allow my mind to be carried by the sounds of the traffic and the birds. But I ended up thinking about that image I can’t get out of my head, of the people hanging out of windows, looking for a way out of an impossible situation, trying desperately to survive. Is that us? If it is, I don’t think our love of life is a mindless reflex. I believe it’s an amazing achievement. I guess that’s why I still have faith in human beings. A friend who spent the morning at ground zero said the message of the official ceremonies was one of compassion, and that the children’s reading of the names of the dead was sadly and profoundly beautiful. At Union Square the responses from the people on the street were mostly very positive, and today some big mainstream polls are showing that Americans are losing patience with the war march. So there are reasons to be hopeful. If we want to hold a commemorative event in the future, we might make it later in the day, to avoid conflicting with the downtown ceremony. For the last two years my friend K. has organized a singing circle to honor the anniversary of September 11. She sends out an email invitation, and a bunch of people meet in the park to sing songs about New York. It’s

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cathartic and totally fun, and of course the crowd loves us. Maybe next year we could do an event that includes a peace lay-down and then connects with the singing circle. Iris-Eye has volunteered to teach us her rendition of Meredith Monk’s “Gotham Lullaby,” which I think we could pull off to great effect. [Lights up as together the GROUP sings a song celebrating New York, with the SUBJECT conducting] AUTHORS NOTE For many of us, 9/11 made clear the need to double our efforts to move theoretical understandings more effectively into action and practice. The astounding number of peace and justice oriented teach-ins that sprung up at schools and universities all over the U.S. in the fall and winter of 2001 made visible widespread academic commitment to activisim through education.19 In the days of “you’re either with us (the U.S. government) or you’re with the terrorists,” for those Americans who strongly felt a responsibility to stand up for peace, questions about how to articulate and enact counterhegemonic positions were particulary urgent and intense. In the past I have used narrative philosophy to convey my own experiments at the boundaries of race, gender, and species. When I began to write a philosophical narrative about the post-9/11 antiwar movement, it became immediately apparent that multiple voices, including unusual characters like the television screen and a representative from the natural world, were needed to tell the story accurately. The political experience described here was had by subjects who are social animals with complex consciousness and life-loving values. It seemed that a play could provide readers with an interesting way to sample and dissect aspects of that experience. What do having a complex consciousness and good ideals have to do with practical politics? In the late 1990s Gloria Anzaldúa wrote: The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is trancended A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.20 Anzaldúa is optimistic about the redemptive power of mestiza consciousness, made real in the flesh and through images and work, and she makes clear that such consciousness is not available only to women of color. Her position resonates with philosopher María Lugones’s

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explorations of the metaphysics and phenomenology of multiplicity.21 If complexity and plurality, rather than unity or stark duality, are the fundamental modes of being and existence, then all intellectual experience and political agency are also far more “multiplicitous” than philosophy has generally found them to be. Recognition of the particular mixtures that we are, and of the hybrid nature of reality itself, encourages the development of new political and aesthetic strategies—ones that make the most of our complex identities, experiences, and relationships. Such an approach was very much at the heart of what was going on in New Yorkers Say No to War. For me, writing multiplicity, or thinking and reading from hybrid perspectives, calls for radical openness to subversive and innovative forms of representation, and to the creativity and playfulness that are often enabled in contexts of true learning. Plays are fantasies that can teach and inspire in novel ways—their polyvocality can encourage critical thinking, and their performance inspires bodily engagement and response. May this play inspire your own experiments, and may it also somehow further the peace impulse it describes. NOTES 1. June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die (New York: Basic Books, 2002): 13. 2. From www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010913–7.html. 3. From www.peacefultomorrow.org. 4. Available at www.petitiononline.com/notowar/petition.html. 5. On www.vacarme.eu.org/article262htm, the birth of New Yorkers Say No to War is described by Dana Burde as follows: “The first meeting of the group that was to become New Yorkers Say No to War took place on Sunday, September 16th at the home of Eve Ensler…. It was a relatively spontaneous gathering of New Yorkers who were in shock after the destruction in southern Manhattan and who wanted to express their concerns and views, most of which seemed immediately to differ from the mainstream US approach, and to diverge widely from the views voiced by George W.Bush. This group wanted to understand the attacks and explore alternatives to violent US responses. There was a sense of urgency in the founding of this new group—a sense that traditional approaches were not entirely satisfying, that a new group was necessary to address the new needs of the current crisis.” 6. Laura Flanders, “A Dream Denied: A Heart-to-Heart Talk About the Middle East in the Heart of Manhattan,” www.workingforchange.com (April 11,2002). 7. Mem Fox, and Leslie Staub, Whoever You Are (New York: Harcourt, 1997). 8. In August 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a report clearly showing how, only a week after 9/11, White House officials had pressured the EPA to prematurely assure New Yorkers that the air they were breathing was safe. See Laurie Garrett, “EPA Misled Public on 9/11 Pollution,” New York Newsday (August 23, 2003) (available at www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823–03.htm). 9. From Marc Herold’s Web site, www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm.

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10. Mohammed Bahir, “Locals Reject U.S. Account of Afghan Convoy Attack,” The New York Daily News (December 22, 2001). 11. “Costs of War in Afghanistan” on www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/01/terror/index.html. 12. To sample media coverage of the February 2002 protests against the World Economic Forum, go to www.time.com/time/photoessays/wef/index.html, and monkeyfist.com/wef-news/. 13. John Aglionby, “Bali Prays to Free Souls Trapped by Bombing,” The Guardian (November 15, 2002). 14. The Cabaret on War was directed by Abigail Gampel. 15. Recorded February 18, 2003, www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/030220.html. 16. From www.abcnews.com, March 12, 2003 17. The full text of the resolution can be found on the Web site of Cities for Peace, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, www.ipsdc.org/citiesforpeace. 18. According to the National Priorities Project, www.nationalpriorities.org. 19. For a thorough discussion of the post-9/11 campus teach-in movement, see the special issue of Academe, the publication of the American Association of University Professors, available at www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/02JF/02jf911.htm. 20. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, second edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999), p. 102. 21. María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

REFERENCES Aglionby, John. 2002. Bali prays to free souls trapped by bombing. The Guardian (15 November). Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. 2d ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Bahir, Mohammed. 2001. Locals reject U.S. account of Afghan convoy attack. The New York Daily News (22 December). Flanders, Laura. 2002. A dream denied: A heart-to-heart talk about the Middle East in the heart of Manhattan. Available online at www.workingforchange.com. Fox, Mem, and Leslie Staub. 1997. Whoever you are. New York: Harcourt. Garrett, Laurie. 2003. EPA misled public on 9/11 pollution. New York Newsday (23 August) (available at www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823–03.htm). Jordan, June. 2002. Some of us did not die. New York: Basic Books. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield.

12 ENCOUNTERS WITH MEMORY AND MOURNING Public Art as Collective Pedagogy of Reconciliation1 Pilar Riaño-Alcalá Reflecting on the need to remember the dead, so as to exorcise oblivion, a youth from the Colombian city of Medellín, where more than 40,000 youth have died writes: Death on its own is not complete death. Complete death is forgetting. There is nobody more dead than those who forget. We should know that here in Medellín better than anyone—something we’ve learnt in the last years through fate and chance, through the luck of those who have survived this atrocious profession of bullfighting with death…by those who bullfight with the reddest cape, the most happy and alive…and also the weakest: our youth. Also, and on the other side of that same cape, we have learnt the trade of forgetting.2 His words interrogate forgetting and reveal a sense of loss inflicted by the multiple forms of violence experienced by Colombians in the last fifty years. Colombian society appears to have great difficulties dealing with its violent past and considering questions of societal reconciliation. This inability is not simply a result of acute social conflicts that feed the wars but, I argue here, is also related to the micropolitics of community making and mourning. Based on my ethnographic research on memory and violence in the city of Medellín, and my collaboration in a community public arts project, The Skin of Memory, I embark on a reflection on the effects of violence on the human experience. I am guided in this reflection by a desire to connect the societal tasks of remembrance, mourning, and the confrontation of a violent past with the vision of developing sustainable peace processes as acts of collective pedagogy. The public arts initiative took place in a barrio (neighborhood) called Antioquia, in southwest Medellín, a neighborhood with a distinct history marked by exclusion, social tensions, and multiple forms of drug-related, territorial, political, and everyday violence. The Skin of Memory—using art, ritual, and commemoration—responded to a growing sense of discontinuity that concerns the local youth. The Skin of Memory began in 1998 with a series of workshops in which the artist Suzanne Lacy and I, a

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Colombian-Canadian anthropologist who had conducted fieldwork research and facilitated a community process of history reconstruction in barrio Antioquia, worked with a team of more than twenty leaders to develop a common vision for the museum and the celebration. The project brought together the public art vision of Suzanne Lacy and my anthropological research and community work in Colombia.3 We worked in collaboration with local youth, women, community leaders, and community workers from five local nongovernmental and government organizations4 and with a multidisciplinary team that included historians, social workers, educators, artists, and architects. In the first part of this project, a team of youth and women from the barrio gathered about five hundred objects symbolizing memory for the people of Antioquia. Between 1998 and 1999 this team of community leaders worked with local historian Mauricio Hoyos to prepare the process of object recollection to outline a corresponding strategy of community education. The objects were collected and installed in a bus-turned-memory-museum that roamed through different sectors of the neighborhood and to a subway station in Medellín. Mourning and reflecting on the past were emphasized through the selection of artifacts that symbolized a significant personal memory for residents. As the object collectors visited their neighbors, they became both witnesses and scribes of the histories and emotions that accompanied these artifacts of the material world. The objects transformed the museum into a dynamic site of individual and collective memories; a place that not only paid tribute to the people of the barrio but also unveiled the conflictive character of local memories. Individual memories (deposited in specific objects) frequently connected the local, family life and conflicts, to wider practices and histories such as the political violence of the 1950s, the global market of illicit drugs, and the policies of urban planning and social exclusion. The second part of the project worked to overcome the mistrust and hostility among residents to create a collective pedagogical and symbolic venue that could collaboratively envision a future. Those who loaned artifacts to the project and the visitors had the opportunity to compose

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Figure 1. Bus-Museum “The Skin of Memory,” Interior, Barrio Antioquia, Medellín. a letter with a wish for an unknown neighborhood resident as well as a specific wish for the future of barrio Antioquia. Nearly 2000 letters, written on thick white paper, were placed inside large white envelopes and exhibited next to the objects in the museum. After ten days and 4,000 visitors, the exhibit ended with a performance-celebration where six carnival troupes of mimes in bicycles, storytellers, chirimias,5 stiltswalkers, and pedestrians moved throughout the neighborhood, celebrating the museum installation. The mimes also delivered one of the unopened letters to every home in the area, signifying a collective anticipation for the future. The museum installation and this final celebration took place in July of 1999. LARGE-SCALE VIOLENCE AND THE MICROPOLITICS OF MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION During the past fifteen years, the Medellín Office of Peace and Coexistence has negotiated more than one hundred pacts of nonaggression with youth gangs and urban militias of the northeastern, central-eastern, southwestern, and southeastern zones of the city (Daza 2001). In the vast majority of cases, these pacts have been short lived, and in a matter of

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months these groups or factions reinitiated armed confrontations. The ongoing failure of “peace pacts” is due in part to the direct relationship between local conflicts and macro-social systems of violence as well as a lack of political will necessary to sustain these peace processes. It also has to do with the inefficiency and impunity characteristic of the Colombian judicial systems, a failure in the development and implementation of economic and social integration strategies for these youth, as well as the absence of cultural interventions that help process the unexpressed feelings of revenge and grief that continue to feed hate and violence. This chapter is thus concerned with the conditions wherein peace and reconciliation processes operate and can be made viable at a micro-social level. I engage a practice of a humanistic anthropology that elicits dialogue and an exploration of knowledge as an “intersubjective process of sharing experience” (Jackson 1996, 9), and I also practice educational work that considers memory and mourning as key elements in societal reconstruction and sustainable peace processes. My identification as cultural worker, researcher, and Colombian overlap here and inform my argument on memory, loss, and the micro-politics of reconciliation. Memory, ritual, and art are dynamic media to recognize social suffering and to encourage collective mourning. Moreover, they are elements of a collective civic pedagogy that elicits critical thinking that addresses how violence destroys local social life. This collective civic pedagogy also works to instigate community dialogue to address the sharp separation between representations of violence and the experiences of human suffering, as well as related binary constructions (victim/victimizer, violent/nonviolent) that disregard the complexities embedded in the experience of violence. In sum, a civic pedagogy needs to work with—not avoid or deny—suffering and mourning to reach a negotiated resolution of the conflict and promote pacific coexistence. Debates concerning policies of reconciliation in postconflict societies (including North America) have succumbed to a problematic dichotomy between an alternative for reconciliation and the application of justice through trials and tribunals. Reconciliation is associated with a hegemonic act of silencing the horrors of the past for the purpose of national reconstruction, in order to set the stage for a supposed national consensus that neutralizes violence (Fundación Manuel Cepeda 1998; Humphrey 2002; Paris 2000). After examining the profound impact of a multiplicity of violence in the daily life of the residents of Medellín, I argue for a comprehensive view of reconciliation that expands its field of sociopolitical action into a multitude of public spheres that include the local and intimate spheres. I understand that reconciliation can be achieved gradually through a series of acts of literacy6 whereby a social group situates itself as witness of a violent and atrocity-laden past. More precisely, reconciliation requires mediating acts that compel a collective to confront its past through testimony, recognition of pain, and dialogue (Humphrey 2002).7

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COLOMBIA, MEDELLĺN, AND BARRIO ANTIOQUIA Medellín is the capital of the Department of Antioquia and the secondlargest city in Colombia. In the 1980s, Medellín became the strategic center for the operations of the powerful Medellín drug cartel, undergoing a dramatic social transformation. Youth, in particular, joined gangs or became sicarios (hired assassins) or part of an underground network of illegal services for organized crime. Death statistics and victim profiles changed dramatically on local and national levels. The victims of homicide were now mostly men (90 percent) between 13 and 38 years old (85 percent) (Camacho and Guzmán 1990). Colombia had become one of the most violent countries worldwide, reaching a yearly average of seventy-seven homicides per 100,000 people. By 1991, the city of Medellín was showing a much bleaker picture, reaching a rate of 381 homicides per 100,000 people (Corporación Region 1999). Since the end of the 1980s, the proliferation and growth of the national guerrilla groups and the paramilitary groups also had a major impact in the spread of violence in Medellín. On a national level, the two leftist guerrilla groups, particularly the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or National Liberation Army), demonstrated a steady growth in the number of combatants, controlled territories, and subversive actions. The right-wing paramilitary groups united in the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), financed by rich landowners and drug cartels and with direct links with the Colombian army, expanded through the national landscape, disseminating terror through massacres and forced displacement. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Colombian large-scale political and social violence is the most critical crisis affecting the continent, given Colombia’s geopolitical impact on the entire region, its rich resources, the strategic position of the country at the entrance to South America, and its singular interlinking of guerrilla warfare, organized crime, war on drugs, dirty war, and social/everyday violence. Colombia, the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, is at the center stage of competing international interests and forces (e.g., the United States’s $1.3 billion Colombia Plan, the Andean Regional Initiative). The repercus-sions of this multilayered conflict in the region are found not only in the potential threat to borders and the destabilizing impact on markets. They are also found in the dramatic human costs of a war that is felt through the massive internal displacement (2.5 million people internally displaced in the past decade), the death statistics (25,000 violent deaths per year), the growing number of refugees crossing national borders, the large numbers leaving the country (more than a million in the

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past decade), and the highest kidnapping rates in the world (50 percent of the world total). The origins of barrio Antioquia date back to the 1920s when it was a nucleus receptor for poor migrants from the countryside who came from diverse regions of the department of Antioquia.8 The political violence that ravaged the country in the 1950s was intensely felt in the neighborhood until 1951, when it was declared a red-light district by a municipal decree. The barrio’s streets were filled with prostitutes, brothels, and visitors of all types, as their schools were converted into prophylactic centers. The red-light district had many consequences on social delinquency and in the establishment of the barrio as a hub for marketing of psychoactive drugs in the city. During the 1960s and 1970s, a growing drug industry took over barrio Antioquia as a social and geographic base9 and offered the only chances for social mobility. During the 1960s several people of the barrio joined the marijuana-industry networks as drug mules and traffickers, and in the 1970s and 1980s these links expanded to the cocaine industry and networks of organized crime to whom a plethora of services were offered.10 The neighborhood lived through periods of violence that intensified in the early 1990s, when six local gangs engaged in territorial battles. The most critical moment was in 1993 when more than 200 youth from the neighborhood died violently. In December 1993, the local priest, the drug lord, and community leaders promoted peace conversations among the gangs. The six gangs involved in the confrontation agreed to sign a pact of nonaggression; by mid 1994, however, peace was broken, and since then the dynamics of “war” and “peace,” of agreements and ruptures, continue. OFFICIAL DISCOURSES OF EXCLUSION: RESEARCH, MEDIA, AND DESCRIPTIONS OF BARRIO ANTIOQUIA During their research exploits through barrio Antioquia, a group of psychiatrists concluded that youth involved in violent conflict had a “fatalist perspective on life, that they place little importance on responsibility or individual participation in the events of their own existence” (Angel et al. 1995, 47). The youth of barrio Antioquia, the psychiatrists tell us, maintain a focus on “a narcissistic image of aggressive power” and an impulsion toward “revenge or deriving maniacal satisfaction through partying or drugs” (Angel et al. 1995, 48). Their conclusion in 1997 does not stray far from the image created in this region in 1951, when the municipal administration of Luis Peláez Restrepo declared it the redlight district of the city of Medellín. Peláez argued that “Barrio Antioquia was the most appropriate site for a red-light district for its situation; its previous contamination”11 (my emphasis). Nor does it differ much from the description that three North American

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journalists made of the residents of barrio Antioquia in 1988, as the “perpetrators of the most horrendous crimes of Medellín” (Eddy, Sabogal and Walden 1988, 29). Researchers, politicians, and journalists contributed, over a period of four decades, to the construction of a discourse of pathology, immorality, and social delinquency—the barrio was a niche of social marginalization that is to be feared. I first came to this neighborhood in 1997 as part of an interinstitutional initiative supported by the community association to reconstruct the barrio’s history. A local nongovernmental organization (NGO), Corporación Presencia Colombo-Suiza, had received funding from the municipal Office of Peace and Co-existence to carry out a community process of history reconstruction. The barrio’s community leaders, the NGO, and the municipal office agreed that in barrio Antioquia a sense of shared history was a driving force for its residents and a strategic way to reinforce the fragile peace process between neighborhood gangs. Supported by other local NGO, Corporación Región, I carried out this project with groups of youth, women, community leaders, and ex-gang members.12 The cartography of memories that emerged indicated more complex social and cultural frameworks than that of delinquency, crime, and illegal networks described by media, politicians, and other researchers. In barrio Antioquia, people live with the extremes of illegality and armed violence. They also live with daily anxiety, the feelings of pain and anguish, and they tenaciously maintain an oral tradition and community celebrations that tie together feelings of belonging as a neighborhood. The effect of violent acts alongside policies of social exclusion have been devastating to the social fabric and experiences of neighborhood residents. Traces of these effects are explained through Doris Salcedo’s concept of the “social wound,”13 as well as in an exploration of the ways in which suffering is re-signified as a social experience (Das and Kleinman 2001). The crossfire between the impacts of macro-social process of urban planning, political violence, and the political economy of the drug industry inflicts collective wounds. The resulting conflicts that are bleeding local gangs, their families, and entire blocks of the neighborhood lead to an ongoing exodus of residents in pursuit of coronar [literally, crowning, finding success] through the transportation or traqueteo (trafficking) of drugs. The resulting social suffering stems from the effects of these national and local powers on the extreme daily experience of facing death, the paradigmatic games of loyalties, the lack of community processes for mourning, and the disintegration of social trust. This social suffering has its origins and consequences in the devastating lesions that social forces infringe upon the human experience (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997).

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NARRATIVE LANDSCAPES OF LOSS In barrio Antioquia, as in the rest of Medellín, residents tell multiple and contested versions about the past. Individuals and social groups select and reorganize those memories—and that which is forgotten—which allows them to define themselves as distinct beings and members of “temporal communities of listening and telling,” or communities of memory.14 Local oral histories are powerful conveyors of the experiences of violence. A great number of oral narratives organize daily life around the events of death and the dead, and they frequently intertwine references to a person’s status in life and in death to form a chronology of loss and pain. A social construction of “death as inevitable” (or “predestined”) often accompanies these oral narratives and particularly the local youth representations of death as an active and all-powerful agent. Phrases such as “it is like when you are going to die, death looks for you” and “death is the messenger that comes with the last hour” illustrate this construction of death. Death and loss are also represented in homemade monumentaltars, set up in living rooms and bedrooms, that contain objects and artifacts to commemorate the dead. Outside, the presence of the dead rests in the decorative symbols and artifacts placed on grave sites: the team insignia of the dead youth’s favorite soccer team, the red-and-pink hearts through which the young widows or girlfriend-widows depict their love, now stunted by death. To what extent does the social construction of death as inevitable obstruct the recognition of the individuals as subjects of their own actions? This oral history about the dead, the homemade monument-altars, the mementos, and the decorations on the tombs make up part of the rituals and practices of remembering to struggle against the routinization of death and the trivialization of violence. These constructions also reveal latent social tensions for local youth, however, and they led me to wonder what consequences this symbolic displacement of social agency from individual subjects to this collective idea of death has on our understanding of human suffering and on the modes in which youth confront fear, the loss of their friends, and the consequences of their actions on others. If it is really true that these spaces and practices establish links of continuity with the past on a small or private scale, the excess and intensity of violence that repeats itself through time and space hinders the possibilities for collectively coming to terms with loss. Yet it is precisely this type of collective mourning that is needed when human suffering has its origins in large-scale violence and political and economic power. We envisioned the public community art project animating a kind of collective engagement with the past through aesthetic experience, mourning, and storytelling. The possibility to activate these processes of

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memory and mourning rested in the location of the public art project within a civic pedagogy process of community mourning and reconciliation. The point of departure for The Skin of Memory project was the recognition that the daily experience of violence affects the entire lives of all barrio residents and opens a social wound that lacks expressive and narrative vehicles. In communities such as barrio Antioquia, unarticulated grief obstructs the possibility of establishing emotional connections to face the experience of loss. The excess of violence in daily life, furthermore, deters the possibilities of a collective processing of loss. Our Skin of Memory team envisioned a kind of civic pedagogy process to (1) recognize the multiple losses and the fragmentation of the social and moral worlds, (2) acknowledge the ways in which local worlds are altered by larger social forces, (3) create a local context to deal with grief and pain, and (4) develop other forms of relating to death. ARTIFACTS OF MEMORY, SUBJECTS OF HISTORY “Bridge-objects” as Doris Salcedo (in Feiltlowitz 2001) tells us, connect material and human loss to the body and the material world: a porcelain figure from a church, with a crack in the bell tower and an angel playing the guitar, a gift that Tulia doesn’t let anyone touch and that she received from “a person that I loved a lot and now is far away.” Scented talcum powder in a little black bottle made of white cardboard and plastic, with silver flowers that were the last Mother’s Day gift that Nora received before her son was killed. Once the subject disappears, the leftover clothes become evidence of one’s existence there in time and place. Objects thus carry within them aspects of the person who is no longer there and that, in daily life, point to a certain presence of someone now gone (Reyes 2001). The first part of The Skin of Memory project addressed grief by the loaning of a meaningful object (artifact of memory) from each participant family. The “art collectors” worked hard to establish close relationships that permitted those who gave objects to share also the memories that were attached to the objects. A local journalist described the task of the collectors as “urban archaeology,” to look for objects and identify their symbolic weight and to help residents establish and articulate the relationships between the objects, the place each object occupies in the material world, and its link with the past for the family or individual. Through storytelling and sharing, the loaned objects became bridges between the person and her past and between narrator-lenders and listener-collectors. There, in the intimacy of their households, as the objects were being taken out of chests, off shelves, from walls or corners, the stories were told:

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MARTA: [Here is] a ring from one of my sons who I haven’t seen for six years since he went to Miami. I love him a lot, and he left me this as a keepsake I love him a lot and I miss him a lot. JOHN JAIRO: This balaclava belongs to a buddy of mine who was killed, who we had brought downtown one day to buy a shirt and we saw the balaclavas, and he bought two, one black made from a little marijuana plant and one grey, and…. Well, since they killed him, we buried him with the black balaclava and I kept this other one and my other little brother kept some gloves, the only things that were left as a reminder of him. MOTHER: A photo of my girl, my daughter; FATHER: This here is our girl, it’s the only keepsake I have; MOTHER: That we have. FATHER: It belonged to the girl, whom we abandoned in Putumayo after she had died…and I want to preserve this photo as much as I can, keep it by my side. It’s the only treasure that I have, it’s like a treasure, you know what I mean? Objects are infused with oral histories and family and neighborhood traditions: the coal irons with engraved handles, the pots and pewter jars, the picture of the Holy Trinity that was there during the first religious procession of the neighborhood (in 1950). The history of drug trafficking and mulas were evident in the stories told of objects brought from the United States with or without their owner: radios in the form of a 1970s Cadillac, dollar bills, or garish decorative objects. Sometimes objects had been stored in secret; other items had been carefully kept precisely for the opportunity to tell and document a history: sculptures or paintings created in jail, a newspaper clipping narrating the drama of a woman who is caught in the 1970s carrying drugs and is sent to a U.S. jail, the letters a five-year-old girl writes to her dead father carefully stored in a little plastic box, or the cutlery refinished in gold that Griselda Blanco, the “Queen of Cocaine,” gave as a gift to one of the neighborhood grandmothers who had worked for her. Once the objects had been collected, along with their stories of pain, loss, change, travel, beliefs, superstition, and tradition, our challenge as artists and educators was to give them an appropriate context for representation and to facilitate commemoration and social learning. We chose a school bus because we knew there were few places in the neighborhood where residents from all sectors could safely go—therefore, the museum would go to them. In addition, because Colombian bus drivers traditionally fill their bus fronts with decorations to form ambulatory shrines to soccer teams, family, or their preferred patron saint, a bus seemed a natural choice for displaying memorial artifacts. A school bus, devoted to carrying children to their educational site, was transformed into an itinerant museum that crossed territorial divisions and retraced a symbolic route for an encounter with memories. The bus would

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offer a shifting place for contested memories and for the transformation of acts of looking into acts of recognizing—into “acts of literacy.” The Skin of Memory team carefully reviewed the history of each object before arranging them in the bus. Each object was set up so as to emphasize the distinct value it held for the owner. The artist Suzanne Lacy suggested that the objects be grouped together according to visual narrative threads evoked by these objects: life cycles, marking events, sense of loss, cultural practices, and local history. All of the collected artifacts were included in the installation, except those objects that were too big to fit in the display cabinets. As an anthropologist aware of the fragmenting impact of violence on the social fabric of the neighborhood and on relationships of trust, I suggested ways that the representative power of bloody violence could be counteracted through the respectful and artistic display of the object, and I offered alternative cultural images of death to avoid triggering a re-elaboration of memories of violence. The links among the unknown owner of an object, the other objects, and the collective memory resulting from the installation produced a field of rich meanings that encompassed the conflictive nature of local memories and the diverse ways in which local histories recreate national histories. The sequence of these objects, placed with sense and sensibility and lit by hundreds of small white lights, created a visual web of relationships and a candlelight aura of ritual that underscored the magnitude of loss. Once the museum opened its doors, the collectors turned into its witnesses and guardians of memory and, most important, they became literacy workers of memory who shared the histories of the objects with the many visitors, accompanied visitors in their grief, listened to the visitors’ spontaneous telling of stories, and collected written and audiotaped first impressions and comments. In short, their labor as literacy workers of memory was to bear witness to the powerful acts of remembering. Collectors experienced encounters with strangers who offered trust with intimate stories and they observed how visitors recognized each other through this communication of pain or shared emotion. They witnessed how objects became bridges that connected material and human losses to the sentient body. Testimonies of the visitors granted further local recognition to the barrio’s project team and strengthened their leadership and educational roles in local efforts for sustainable peace processes and pacific coexistence. INSIDE THE BUS: MEANINGFUL GAZES Art has a potential to create relationships between individuals during a fleeting moment of observation (Salcedo, in Feiltlowitz 2001).15 By entering the bus-museum, the visitors reactivated the memory of those

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who visited them, recognized objects and faces in photographs, found pieces of history that dated back generations, and shared stories. CARLOS: I am one of those people who, already being an adult, remembers very nostalgically certain things about the neighborhood. [It is] a neighborhood that we keep caring about with much nostalgia but we continue to worry that it is being built on the blood of our youth, of our boys. Our tolerance of death is leading us toward an abyss and I think that we need to believe more in ourselves, in what we are capable of, and what really exists here as part of this tender history, this history of tears. I think that every family in the neighborhood has been affected by death, of a friend or neighbor, I think that this is like entering into the insides of oneself, real nostalgia, I feel like crying. For Carlos, the visit to the museum awakened a multitude of sensations and caused him to reflect on the impact of violence in the community. He was critical of the ways in which history is being constructed in the neighborhood with “the blood of our youth” and the effects of violence on the community. Carlos’s hope that the exhibit “touched the hearts” of the visitors matched ours; we hoped that these memory artifacts would activate a recognition of local history and the impacts of violence in daily life. The reactions of visitors indicated that this connection was very present: JOHN DE PRADO CENTRO: All of these objects talk to us, tell us about the many histories of those who had them in their hands, don’t you think? It was really impressive because, how can I explain it, you don’t need to know the complete histories of all the things that are together there because they all speak about life, death, of youth and old people, of the past, the present, and it seems really great that those who visit the museum, that the people of the neighborhood can come to know this history, because there you can learn a lot about yourself, about the parents of the past. I imagine that it will also make it possible to create many bonds about how to belong and how to feel like you belong to within a history that is not yours alone. I especially noticed the letters, the diaries, and the photographs. Yes, especially the photographs. A crucial element of the community public art project was the understanding that process is a vital element of this type of artistic intervention and civic pedagogy. The process, understood as much in its temporal duration as in its dimension of social interaction in which the

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experience of seeing and making art, becomes a process of creating meanings and common references (Lacy 2003). In The Skin of Memory, the participation of a team of youth and women leaders, the collaboration and coproduction of the event with the team of nongovernment organizations, and the involvement of the processes of art within wider processes of community organization and civic pedagogy, were crucial for establishing a community base as well deepening the aesthetic possibilities for the construction of common meanings about the sense of loss. The entries in the registration book show the diverse ways that the museum was experienced as well as how the museum functioned as a

Figure 2. Visitors to the bus-museum, Barrio Antioquia, Medellín.

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social vehicle/ritual for critical remembering. Visitors made many references to the potential of this museum to help them make sense of the past and re-situate themselves in the present: CHILD: Super-elegant, there are many dead parceros (buddies) in these burguesías (literally “bourgeoisie,” used to mean good, elegant) of photos. CHILD: The bus is bringing all the dead people, the bus is a bus, it’s really neat. WOMAN: I left overwhelmed, moved, shaken. The objects, the voices, the photographs palpitate. YOUNG MAN: It’s something that we can use to bring back the memory of the disappeared…so many people. WOMAN: How powerful, a cupboard where sorrows and joys are set afloat. The barrio residents perceived themselves in a community, and the visitors from other areas of Medellín established associations with their own experience. In many cases, a sense of discovery and curiosity accompanied this aesthetic and reflective experience. The objects were recognized for their historical significance and as markers of important moments. In this subtle manner, the links are drawn among local, regional, and national history: NEIGHBORHOOD WOMAN, 50 years old: Very nice. The photo of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan [a politician and popular leader of the Liberal Party in the mid-1950s] brought back memories. When they killed him in Bogotá I was working at Leticia Fabrics, and while I was on my way home they killed him, a bit after one o’clock, and then the uproar about his murder, and me being so sensitive, I began to cry. VIVIANA: Very good, but it smelled of death, the old things, like the iron, a pair of sandals. More old things and to remind people of the young people who have already died. Artifacts brimming with history and associative potential bring to people such concrete sensations as the smell of death. The metaphor of the bridge-object applies here not only to name this intimate sensation among the article, the person who keeps it, the past, and the sensory world, but also to explain what the bus-museum generated in the intersection between aesthetic experience and social relationships. Objects become bridges between residents and history, the visitors and those who lent pieces, residents of the neighborhood and outside visitors, and between owners of the objects and the resignificance given to them through the museum installation. Art and memory activate this relational perspective toward a desire to recognize, to give testimony—in other words, to think collectively about reconciliation.

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The bus stopped in diverse sectors of the neighborhood and crossed territorial and symbolic borders that divide it. Hundreds of visitors broke through symbolic borders and came to this stigmatized barrio Antioquia. Relational possibilities between citizens of a fragmented city were developed through the visitors’ walks through the complex field of memories offered by the bus-museum. An individual’s engagement with a relational field facilitates alternative constructions of the others that extend beyond the oppressive dichotomies of friend-enemy or good-bad. Visitors could relocate within a common experience of living pain. For the local organizations involved in this project, the geographic diversity of participants who engaged with the event had important social implications, as it supported their vision of democratic citizenship. These organizations are part of a broader social movement that envisions Medellín as a ciudad educadora, a city that promotes a democratic culture, forms of solidarity and citizenship, and a city that values differences and seeks a negotiated resolution to its conflicts. The type of gazes and experiences that the museum provoked left no doubt about the weight of pain and loss in the history of the neighborhood and the city. These experiences also offer clear lessons, as evidenced in the registry-book entries and the “anonymous” letters addressed to an “anonymous” neighbor, exhibited in the bus-museum: Dear Neighbor: Yesterday I saw the invitation to the museum of memories…and I thought that if they had asked me what to put in there, I would have answered, “my life since yesterday….” Today I hear the taped voices that tell about frozen moments in people’s lives, moments that at times leave special words and many memorable objects. Congratulations to the owners of these artifacts of memory for sharing a huge little piece of their lives, as well as those who knew how to transmit the real feelings of others through their ingenuity and sensitivity. NEIGHBOR: It would be a lot better if they could be with us. You know how sad it is, or was, to see all those bodies bleeding to death and dying in silence, gossip, and the screams of everybody around them. You know it is sad, or was, to bury, to speak badly about, to cry and pray for, and to see our loved one lying completely still in box more pathetic than death. You know it is sad and painful, but even more sad and painful when we ignore the fact that we are also guilty even if we haven’t killed whatever guy from whatever part of our dark neighborhood. The writers of the letters move from a mere recognition of pain toward a sense of shared social responsibility that confronts communal silence and indifference. The acts of writing letters and registry-book entries led to new avenues of expression and were central elements of this collective

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civic pedagogy. Writing and sending letters represented other relational acts, which, through written language, activated a visualization of a future and a further reflection on the past. This process, anchored in the use of visual, experiential, dialogic, and written tools, supports the view of a community reconciliation process as collective acts of literacy. The very fact that the bus went through and opened its doors in every one of the sectors of the neighborhood without incident testifies to the recognition that the project received, despite taking place during one of the barrio’s worst periods of armed confrontation. The fighting between two local gangs escalated in the days leading up to the opening of the busmuseum, and on two occasions these gangs disregarded the implicit agreement to respect community events. As organizers of this event, we were afraid that by bringing objects and photos of people involved in the conflict to the bus, it would become a target of aggression. This did not happen, however, and the bus crossed symbolic and physical territorial borders as a moving cultural object, actually creating another type of topography and movement. In part, this was facilitated by previous community work that local leaders had engaged in over the year in their sectors, educating people about the purpose of the project and its relationship to other community initiatives such as the annual festival, Streets of Culture. The impact of a previous memory-recuperation process, the substantive coverage by printed and electronic mass media, and the very expectation that the bus-museum created for the residents of the community also played a role. During the ten-day bus-museum exhibit, we witnessed how the more than four thousand visitors from all over the city were transformed into promoters and disseminators, sharing their reactions and descriptions of its purpose and what it was all about with others. This form of spreading news about the event was in itself a process of resignification and transmission, acts of literacy and communication. During the final festivities, the metaphor of the bridge-object found new meanings. The final celebration built on the dynamic border-crossing itinerary of the bus-museum through six processions that traveled through the various sectors of the neighborhood delivering letters. The processions took over the streets of barrio Antioquia as

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Figure 3. Mimes, stilts, and parade, final celebration, “The Skin of Memory.” expressive spaces and routes to be retraced, establishing connections between the present and future, between sectors and among neighbors, between visitors and the visited, and through anonymous letters to their neighbors. Carnavalesque and recreational traditions of the region were recreated through mimes, music, stilts, dancing, and the procession itself. Sixty mimes on bicycles—the common means of transportation in the neighborhood—came face-painted with smiles. The mimes delivered the letters in silence as each got off her bicycle, bowed to the neighbor, and handed over the letter in an act of reverence that drew attention to the powerful significance of the object being delivered. Afterwards everyone came together in a final parade, which exploded with joy and feelings of future as it wandered through the neighborhood’s main street. The processions and the mimes on bicycles reclaimed a festive atmosphere of celebration, akin to an active neutral space among those able to congregate in the neighborhood. The Skin of Memory team envisioned the final celebration as a festive act extending a bridge between the anonymous neighbor who wrote the letter and those who read it, between those who opened the doors of their homes and those who went out into the street, among mimes, stilt walkers, and peddlers, and those who came together: KELLY: I think that the letters had much more impact than all of the memories of that bus, for those of us who

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were collectors; these letters were something very special—the sentences and pretty words—because they filled up everything, because, while we were in the museum, the whole neighborhood of Antioquia, we were terapiados [like under the effects of therapy] by this thing of remembering. The letters were like a cure, like a cleansing of all the things that we were living through, a kind of forgiving that took place.16 Once the public art project was finished, the group of women and youth leaders continued working on the community process with neighborhood children and youth. With enthusiasm and in the midst of great difficulties, this group fostered cultural and recreational activities and strengthened their roles as leaders and actors for peace. It would be naïve to say that this project will change fundamentally the fabric of relationships and conflicts in barrio Antioquia. However, it empowered a series of possibilities for embracing the aesthetic experience as well as the entangled universe of related cultural meaning for whomever was touched, in any way, by the public art intervention: addressing grief, exorcising specific sorrows, and, as a leader quoted here states, the possibility of forgiveness at the local level. This entangled universe of actions, resignified by a process of social interaction through public art, illustrates the trajectory and emotions that accompany the construction of viable peace processes at the local level as acts of collective literacy. Among many others, the anecdote about Estela’s sister’s photo suggests to us how this game of possibilities was experienced: It wasn’t easy for Estela to hand over the photo of her sister, as it represented the only object preserving her memory that she owned. But Alejandra convinced her when she explained that this photo would be there alongside many other artifacts in a moving museum that would exhibit the meaningful objects of the neighborhood residents’ memories. And Estela, who felt the emptiness left by the missing photo everyday, could verify this when she entered the bus museum and full of emotion, saw the photo of her sister in a glass and aluminum display case lit up by hundreds of incandescent light bulbs. Days later, her other sister visited the bus without knowing that the photo was there. With tears in her eyes, Mirta recognized and looked over the photo seen so many times before, showing it to her night-school friends, and submerging herself in grief. Meanwhile, the eyes of another classroom-mate filled with tears as well, and she remained there in silence, overwhelmed. Later on, she would tell a friend about the

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sorrow she felt about the pain that Mirta was going through over the loss of her sister, as well as her own, as her husband was the one in jail for the murder of that young girl. (Riaño 1999, 79) At the city level, the large amount of attention that the project received in the media attracted many people, who, overcoming fears, crossed imaginary borders and visited the museum, publicly recognizing the human and material impact of violence as a common experience among the residents of Medellín. The bus-museum and final celebration provided a social and spatial context for mourning and witnessing and made possible for those who engaged in the public art process the recovery of some of the ordinary face-to-face relations. Our proposal of memory, ritual, and art as dynamic media for recognizing social suffering and encouraging collective mourning, placed the local (the barrio, the city) as the primary social and spatial context for witnessing (Humphrey 2002). This is a way to face the recovery of the qualities of trust and close relationships in everyday life and to create a context for an engagement in broader reconciliation acts toward society’s reconstruction. MOVEMENTS OF DESIRE, CLAIMS FOR JUSTICE AND REPARATION The process of memory recuperation and community public art temporarily exorcised many of the ghosts and fears of the present, opening doors for encounter via memory, through visit or celebration, and toward addressing grief and reconstruction of the social fabric. Personally, The Skin of Memory project emphasized the importance of thinking about social reconciliation as a gradual process of civic literacy supported by cultural interventions that reconstruct the bonds of neighborhood, of friendship, or of family weakened by so many acts of violence. It also allowed me to further envision alternative routes for the practice of a humanistic anthropology that builds on a dialogue among research and cultural work, academic practice, and civic pedagogy and that embraces my shifting locations as a researcher, cultural worker, mourner, citizen, and passionate subject. The Skin of Memory demonstrates, from local experience, the importance of symbolic legitimation of the claims made by those who suffer and the ways in which historic memories shape the contemporary relationships that individuals have with peace, violence, reconciliation, and justice. How historic memories shape individual understandings of reconciliation is evident at the national negotiation level where diverse actors, including the state, define and negotiate their positions. This point is relevant in Colombia, where the current president, Alvaro Uribe, publicly grieves the assassination of his father by Carlos Castaño, the

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guerrilla and the commander of the national right-wing paramilitary organization, who justifies his acts of terror as part of a personal mission to seek revenge for the assassination of his own father at the hands of the guerrillas. The chief director of the leftist guerrilla FARC, Manuel Marulanda, also remembers bitterly the assassination of all his family members during the national political violence of the 1950s (Narvaez 2003). Orozco (2002) perceptively states that problems of punishment, reparation, and reconciliation should be considered beyond the perspective of a rational subject to include the perspective of a passionate subject. This viewpoint recognizes that strong passions and emotions influence those involved in peace negotiations (Orozco 2002). The symbolic and intrinsic dimensions are fundamental for the restoration of trust, for local and national processes of addressing grief, and for peace processes that begin to appear with marginal amounts of sustainability. Revisiting the concept of the social and political roots of our social wounds, however, it is clear public art and collective pedagogy processes need to be included within broader agendas of social justice, establishment of social and political responsibilities, and prevention of violence. The use of art and memory as fields of interaction and social witnessing allows us to reformulate the field of social action for reconciliation. Reconciliation is thus rearticulated as a desire to face ourselves through the past, rather than a silencing of the past. This involves a return to the senses through recognition of pain and relational memory where experience and testimony intersect. The processes of reconciliation provide a structure and a temporary framework to recognize suffering, to deal with grief, and to face the destructuring of the social world by violence: a human, social, and cultural process that wins over collective places of giving testimony about the past and from which societies and individuals can be better equipped to demand truth and justice, toward recreating a moral community. EPILOGUE In August 1999, a month after finalizing this project, Jaime Garzón, the great Colombian comedian, journalist, politician, and commentator, was assassinated in the streets of Bogotá. His murder unchained a spontaneous and massive human reaction in which the wall in front of Jaime’s house was transformed into a site to express sorrow. On the wall, thousands of notes and messages were hung that expressed personal feelings of pain and anger. On a wall nearby, the artist Doris Salcedo and Jaime’s relatives hung up five thousand roses with the flowers facing down to let them wither. Through this, the walls turned into receptacles of memory, containing and transmitting collective pain, denoting the fragility of a society fraught with death and violence. These places of memory remain as footprints and acts that challenge the attempt to silence

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or shut down dissident voices. One year later, on the anniversary of Jaime’s death, his brother Alfredo and his sister Marisol, accompanied by the artist Doris Salcedo, retraced the route that Jaime had taken on the last day of his life. Along the route, a trail of 45,000 roses were left, leading to the place where he had been assassinated. The artistic and familial gesture gave renewed meaning to the street and the route toward death, while the last steps in the comedian’s life were commemorated and mixed in with the spontaneous manifestation of a society looking for channels and places to express and process its sorrows. Art and popular expression come together to emphasize and register “the pain and loss that inundates the entire country.” They are collective gestures toward making a human response possible in the middle of violent expression that is increasingly frequent in Colombia. These fleeting actions, full of symbolic power, indicate that the places of encounter for Colombians are increasingly not the places of conflict nor violent resolution of conflicts but rather those places in which they can meet as part of a collective group of those who suffer, looking for human answers, expressive channels for sorrow, and means to confront the emptiness left by multiple losses. NOTES 1. This article benefited greatly from lively and critical discussions at the Seminar “Gólgota” of the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations (IEPRI), National University of Colombia and at the Symposium “Violence, Memory and Reconciliation,” University of Oklahoma (February 27 to March 1, 2003). My ongoing discussions and educational exchanges with researchers, community workers, and youth leaders from Medellín influenced many of the ideas in this chapter. Marta Villa, Luz Amparo Sánchez, Dorothy Kidd, Maria Emma Wills, Gonzalo Sánchez, Clemencia Rodríguez, Sebastian Gil-Riaño, Suzanne Lacy, my M.A. students at the seminar “Memory and Identity” (National University of Colombia 2002), and the editors of this book, Erica Meiners and Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, provided insightful feedback. A version of this chapter was published in Spanish in 2003 (Riaño 2003). Sheila Gruner translated this previous version to English. 2. Ricardo Aricapa, “Cambio de clase.” Edúcame. (November 1997): 12 (quoted in Henao and Castañeda 2001, 7). 3. In her book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995), Suzanne Lacy outlines her approach to community public art as communication of public issues (see also her article in Riaño 2003). Suzanne and I met in Vancouver in 1996 when we collaborated in a community public art project with young women. Results from my research on memory and violence in Colombia can be found in Riaño 2001, 2002, 2003. 4. The members of the project’s coordinating team and workers in the local organizations were William Alvarez, Jorge García, Juan Vélez, and Angela Velásquez. This team combined a wealth of educational and community work expertise with their individual professional training as educators, psychologists, and historians. I was responsible for the overall coordination of the project, Suzanne Lacy for its artistic vision, and the historian

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Mauricio Hoyos for its production. The four organizations that supported and funded the project were the Secretaría de Educación de Medellín (Education Secretariat of Medellín), the Caja de Compensación Familiar (COMFENALCO), and two nongovernmental organizations, Corporación Región and Presencia Colombo Suiza. 5. Chirimia refers to a live outdoor musical performance or group. 6. Literacy in this view is defined from a Freiran approach and is an ethos, or a way of seeing and comprehending the world (Lankshear 1997). 7. Humphrey defines “reconciliation” as a collective witnessing of the past through the testimony of the victims, and “justice” as witnessing shaped by criminal prosecution (Humphrey 2002). What kinds of memory and commemoration are needed in a fragmented society, one that has been socially and morally debilitated by war? Can social wounds of a violent past heal when justice is not practiced? How can memory practices educate about the social suffering caused by armed violence? 8. The department or province, also called Antioquia, should not be confused with the neighborhood Antioquia that is located in the capital city, Medellín of this same department. 9. Several factors favored the establishment and dominance of barrio life by the drug economy: its close proximity to the city’s airport, the presence of organized networks of house thieves, and the unique experiences of several locals as pick pockets in the United States. 10. Some of the key characters in the establishment of a Colombian presence in the U.S. market of drugs were from barrio Antioquia. This is the case of the brothers Mejia, Darío Pestañas, and Griselda Blanco “the Coca Queen” who played a key role in the Miami cocaine wars of the 1970s. 11. El Colombiano (August 29, 1951): 11 12. With each one of these groups, we worked toward recovering memories of significant experiences and events in the barrio and the city Each group created a “memory product” that they presented in a final session in which all of the groups and many other community residents shared their memories concerning the history of the barrio. I transcribed the stories collected during the memory sessions and organized them chronologically and thematically into an anecdotario (booklet of anecdotes) that was left with the community. The products and outcomes of this process went beyond the project, resulting in, for example, the production of three amateur videos by the youth group, the dramatization of several parts of the anecdotario during the Streets of Culture celebration, and the use of the anecdotes book by the schools or by residents who took on the task of writing a history of the barrio. 13. Doris Salcedo (in Feiltlowitz 2001) sustains that although the family’s sorrow is of an intimate nature, when the events that cause this pain are of political nature society needs to acknowledge the collective character of the injury. 14. The narratives concerning death and the dead illustrate ways in which the residents of the city give meaning to their daily experiences facing widespread violence. This living memory of the past is based on direct testimonies, personal and collective experiences, rumors, and oral tradition and is organized through a cartography of mnemonic places. An in-depth analysis of this oral history can be found in Riaño 2000. 15. For Salcedo, her artwork presents “an image that is full of experiences and in spite of that, in silence, without anecdotes. Where the spectator, in an act

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of silent contemplation, can be made to contact his or her own memory of pain alongside the pain of the victim, and through this juxtaposition, the victim appears.” (in Feiltlowitz 2001). 16. Quoted by Mauricio Hoyos (2001,124).

REFERENCES Angel, Alina, Mauricio Fernandez, Angel M.Jaramillo and Jorge I.Zapata. 1995. Combos y cambios: Reflexiones psicoanalíticas en un proceso de paz entre bandas juveniles. Medellín: Alcaldía de Medellín and Universidad de Antioquia. Camacho, Alvaro, and Alvaro Guzmán. 1990. Colombia: Ciudad y violencia. Bogotá: Foro Nacional. Corporación Region. 1999. Medellín: Ciudad en retroceso. Internal document. Medellín: Author. Das, Veena, and Arthur Kleinman. 2001. Introduction. In Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering and recovery, edited by V.Das et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Daza, Ana. 2001. Experiencias de intervención en conflicto urbano. Medellín: Alcaldía de Medellín. Eddy, Paul, Hugo Sabogal and Sara Walden. 1988. The cocaine wars. New York: Norton. Feiltlowitz, Marguerite. 2001. Interview with Doris Salcedo. Crimes of War Magazine. Available online at www.crimesofwar.org/cultural/doris. Accessed August 28, 2002. Fundación Manuel Cepeda. 1998. Duelo, memoria, reparación. Bogota: Author. Henao, José, and Luz S.Castañeda. 2001. El parlache. Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia. Hoyos, Mauricio. 2001. La piel de la memoria. Barrio Antioquia: Pasado, presente y futuro. Medellín: Corporación Region. Humphrey, Michael. 2002. The politics of atrocity and reconciliation: From terror to trauma. London: Routledge. Jackson, Michael. 1996. Introduction: Phenomenology, radical empiricism, and anthropological critique. In Things as they are, edited by M.Jackson. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock. 1997. Introduction. In Social suffering, edited by A.Kleinman et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lacy, Suzanne. Hacer arte público. Como memoria colectiva, como metáfora y como acción. In Arte, memoria y violencia. Reflexiones sobre la ciudad, edited by Pilar Riaño, Medellín: Corporación Region, 2003:61–82. Lacy, Suzanne. 1995. Mapping the terrain: New genre public art. Oakland, Calif.: Bay Press. Lankshear, Colin. 1997. Changing literacies. Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press. Narvaez, Leonel. 2003. Schools of forgiveness and reconciliation. ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America (spring): 47–49. Orozco, Ivan. 2002. La posguerra colombiana: Divagaciones sobre la venganza, la justicia y la reconciliación. Análisis Político 46:78–99. Paris, Erna. 2000. Long shadows: Truth, lies and history. Toronto: Random House.

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Reyes, A.M. 2001. Horrific beauty: Commemoration and the aestheticization of violence in contemporary Colombian art. Paper presented at the seminar “New Perspectives in the Study of Social Conflict,” Unpublished, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 23. Riaño, Pilar. 1999. La piel de la memoria. Nova & Vetera 36:79–85. ——. 2000. La memoria viva de las muertes: Lugares e identidades juveniles en Medellín. Análisis Político (December): 23–39. ——. 2001. “Por qué, a pesar de tanta mierda, este barrio es poder?” Historias locales a la luz nacional. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 36:50–83. ——. 2002. Remembering place: Memory and violence in Medellín, Colombia. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7(1):276–310. ——. Ed. 2003. Arte, memoria y violencia: Reflexiones sobre la ciudad. Medellín: Corporación Region.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Amanda Boggan is a single mother living in poverty. She finds the resources to cook and distribute quality protein-based food to homeless people and others in desperate need. She works outside the system to get food and funding and in the process strengthens community relationships. Amanda considers her work to be an act of solidarity rather than charity, though some might call it criminal. She believes she is working in community with a perspective that is much meaner, finely honed, and more grounded than her previous efforts to overcome poverty. Shauna Butterwick is a feminist adult educator and researcher and also an assistant professor in the Adult Education Program in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She teaches courses in adult education, social justice in education, feminist theory, and leadership and policy. Her research interests include examining social movements, particularly feminist movement(s), as sites of learning; exploring the impact of social welfare and labor market policy and programs on marginalized women; and investigating the limits and possibilities of alternative research methodologies, in particular, community-based, action-oriented approaches to conducting research. Chris Cuomo is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She divides her time between New York and Ohio, and between academic, activist, and artistic pursuits (a sample is at www.chriscuomo.org). Her books include Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (Routledge 1998), Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (coedited with Kim Hall, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), and The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). She is presently Visiting Fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. Adriana Espinoza is a doctoral student in Counseling Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her work experience includes settlement and counseling services with Latin American refugees and immigrants. Her clinical and research area of interest is individual and collective trauma and healing in the context of communities in exile. Mary Hermes is a faculty member at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She serves as a curriculum consultant and board member, and she

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teaches at the Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion School in Hayward, Wisconsin. She is a Native person of mixed heritage. Michael Hoechsmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University in Montreal. His research interests include media studies, multimodal literacies, cultural studies, political economy, and anti-racist theory/pedagogy. For a fouryear period, he was the Executive Director and Director of Education of Young People’s Press (YPP), a news service for youth, ages 14 to 24. Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco is currently the British Columbia community-based researcher in HIV/AIDS, housed at the BC Persons With AIDS Society. He has worked as consultant social researcher, community educator, and university instructor. He is the cochair of the Canadian Working Group on HIV and Rehabilitation (www.backtolife.ca). His writing is infected/mediated by his gay erotica and essays on sexuality. His first novel, Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers: The ChaCha Years (Arsenal Pulp Press), was published in 2001. His collection of short stories, Killing Me Softly/Morir Amando, will appear in 2004. Jennifer Jenson is Assistant Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education at York University. When not teaching, she enjoys watching surgeries on the Learning Channel and drinking lemonlime Kool-Aid. Her most noteworthy accomplishments have been her “triple J” initials and a kind willful optimism that keeps her hunting around in the catbox for a “good idea.” Patti Lather is Professor in the Cultural Studies in Education Program, School of Educational Policy and Leadership at The Ohio State University, where she teaches qualitative research in education and gender and education. Her work includes Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern (1991), and, with Chris Smithies, Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS (1997). She is currently working on a manuscript, Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science, that explores the methodological learnings from the women and HIV/AIDS Study. Erica R.Meiners teaches at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She is involved in a variety of community initiatives in Chicago, especially Beyondmedia (www.beyondmedia.org), and she works and teaches in the areas of qualitative research methodologies and feminist anti-racist social change, prison industrial complex resistances and the “schools to jails” pipeline, and trauma studies. She is the author of articles in Gender and Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and Race, Ethnicity and Education. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and Family Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an urban anthropologist and communicator whose research, grassroots community/pedagogical work, writing, and teaching bordercross Latin and North America. In 1994, she edited Women in Grassroots Communications: Furthering Social Change and has recently completed a

Contributor biographies

191

book manuscript entitled Dwellers of Memory: Youth, Memory, and Violence in Medellín, Colombia. Michael Sanders is Assistant Professor of Education in the College of Education, Department of Curriculum and Foundations at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio. His research interests include documenting life histories of ordinary people, the self-representations and critical consciousness of future teachers, and the use of pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed as revolutionary participatory action research. David Stovall is Assistant Professor of Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include critical race theory, educational policy analysis, education for social justice and education law.

INDEX

Academic suicide, 9, 49, 118 Activism Activist nuns, 171 ACT-UP HIV/AIDS activism, 3 Ambiguous roles in academic/activist work, 136, 139–144, 153–155, 166–168 Anti-war activism, 206–208 gender equity activist, 135, 144 language activist, 69 “radical activist”, 144 Adams, D.W., 61 Addiction “Addiction to drama”, 44–45 Addiction/recovery framework, 43 Allende, I., 87 Allman, D., 36, 52 Alvarez, W., 233 Ambiguity, anxiety and ambivalence (as triumvirate), 60 Anderson, J., 117 Angel, A., 216, 217 Anjos, E., 138, 156 Anzaldúa, G., 207 Archer, J., 156 Aricapa, R., 233 Art as community-building practice, 222, 233 public art The Skin of Memory, 211–234 30 Days of Arts and Education on Women’s Incarceration, 170–174 public practice for politicized social change, 207–208 response to violence, 207–208, 211–234 Askew, S., 144 Audiences, 2, 181, 161, 171 Avray, M., 87 Bakhtin, M., 9 Banasik, B., 79 Barker, D., 61 Benoit, J., 109

Index

194

Bernstein, S., 105 Betrayal of research subjects, 35, 142, 169, 172 Blanco, G., 221, 233 Boal, A., 2, 92, 93, 94, 96 101–102 Boggan, A., 10 Booth, K., 138 Britzman, D., 183 Brohman, J., 87 Bryson, M., 137–138, 140, 142–145, 152–156 Burbules, N., 16, 186 Burde, D., 208 Butterwick, S., 10 Camacho, A., 215 Castaneda, L., 233 Centro, J., 223 Chan, V., 135 Chasnoff, S., 161, 162, 163, 170, 174–175 Chen, S., 112 Chile, political history, 73–75 Chismore, E., 127 Chomsky, N., 33 Churchill, W., 133 Clandinin, J., 57 Clifford, J., 181 Cockerill, R., 36, 52 Colombia political context of Medellin and Barrio Antioquia, 215–216 Colonialism, colonization, 59, 62 Community activism, 24, 162 -based research, 22, 36–39, 177 development, 22, 75, 84 limitations of term, 162, 177 school as site for community-based -university collaborations, 121–125, 162, 171, 172–174, 211–213 work, 122–123, 135 Community service, 131 Communities of memory, 218 acquiring community participation in projects, 121–123 community public art project, description The Skin of the Memory, 219–222 30 Days of Arts and Education on Women’s Incarceration, 170–174 Connelly, M., 57 Consumer culture, 31 Contract theory, 28 Conway, D., 185 Crawford, C., 138, 156 Croce, A., 186 Cultural genocide, 62 Cultural relevant pedagogy, 125, 131

Index

195

Culture-based curriculum, 64, 128 Cuomo, C., 2, 6, 9, 11, 163, 177 Curriculum indigenous language immersion, 60, 65 interdisciplinary, 95 as “living deconstruction”, 125–126 media and race, 125–127 Null, 91 as raising critical consciousness, 93, 125–127 transitive, 94 Cvetkovich, A., 3 Das, V., 217, 218 Davis, A., 162, 176 Daza, A., 213 de Beauvoir, S., 151 de Castell, S., 45, 51, 137–138, 140, 142–144, 152–156 de Certeau, M., 37 Deconstruction, 126 Deleuze, G., 36 Demers, N., 109 Derrida, J., 183 Desire, 8–9, 35, 40, 49, 69, 168 Dialogue, 15–21 Dimitrardis, G., 127 Diversity, youth critiques of, 128 Diversity, misconceptions, 128 Dixon, C., 144 Dominguez, R., 77 Dorfman, A., 87 Ellsworth, E., 47 Espinoza, A., 2, 6, 9, 10, 76 Esquivel, A., 85 Ethics Harm-reduction Policies, 7, 43 Pimum non nocere, 7 Ethnography feminist ethnography, 142, 169, 178, 181–186 institutional ethnography, 163, 164 vanity ethnography, 164 Evans, P., 29, 30, Ewen, S., 111 Exchange of obedience for protection, 28–29 Fair-trade organizations, 23 Feiltlowitz, M., 219, 222, 234 Feminism, 135, 136, 169 backlash to feminism, in K-12 schools, 138 feminist ethnography, 169, 142, 178, 181–186 Fernandez, S., 105

Index

196

Fine, M., 164 Foley, D., 182–183 Ford-Smith, H., 179 Forgacs, D., 53 Foucault, M., 9, 36–38, 40, 45, 47, 52–53, 138–139, 183–184 Francis, B., 144 Franco, J., 39 Frazier, L., 78 Freire, P., 2, 15–16, 33, 92–93, 99, 117 Frye, M., 175–176, 177 Fuss, D., 5 Gaines, J., 3 Galeano, E., 87 Garcia, J., 233 Garzon, J., 231 Gender, 136, 139 Gender equity work, 136 women-centered perspective, 25 GENTECH, 137, 142 Gilbert, J., 77, 78 Gil-Riano, S., 232 Globalization and anti-globalization, 27 Goffman, E., 7 Gordon, A., 1 Gould, M., 112 Gramsci, A., 40, 53, 110 Grossberg, L., 110, 111 Gruner, S., 232 Guattari, F., 36 Guzman, A., 215 Haig-Brown, C., 164 Halbwachs, M., 79 Hale, K., 59 Hampton, F., 129 Haraway, D., 43 Harvey, D., 110 Haug, F., 53, 152, 156 Haymes, S., 128 Healing, act of, 66, 76 collective healing, 82 Hebdige, D., 111, 112 Henao, J., 233 Herman, J., 75 Hermes, M., 2, 8, 10, 63, 164 Hidalgo, N., 133 Hill, C., 138, 156 Hinton, L., 59 HIV/AIDS, 36, 40–44, 47–51, 181 Hoagland, S., 164, 170

Index

197

Hoechsmann, M., 2, 11 hooks, b., 66, 92, 118–119, 127, 181 Hoyos, M., 212, 233–234 Huber, B., 138 Humphrey, M., 214, 215, 230, 233 Ibanez-Carrasco, F., 9, 10, 41, 53, 55, 83, 87, 232 Ibrahim, A., 91 Ideology anti-poverty ideology, 26 Praxis oriented ideology, 119 Impunity, 74, 82 Impure criticism, 110 Inclusion/exclusion, 5, 27 academic insiders/outsiders, 5, 162, 166 official discourses of exclusion, 216–18 “Indifference” (Owens), 6 Inkpen, K., 138 Institutional analysis, 164 Institutional discourse, 146 “Institutional order” (Smith), 146 Interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary College of education rejections of 117, 119, 169 creations of new disciplinary practices, 5 limitations of the disciplinary apparatus, 169–170 limitations of disciplinary ways of knowing, 169–170, 175–176, 179 Internalized oppression, 62 Intimacy, 38, 48, 163, 175–176 “Arrogant perception” 163, 177 Jackson, M., 214 Jelin, E., 73 Jenson, J., 2, 11, 45, 137, 152, 156 Jones, B., 186 Jordan, J., 189 Kay, D., 77 Kecht, M., 130 Kelly, E., 130 Kerr, T., 41, 43, 53 Khon, S., 86 Kidd, D., 232 King, J., 118 Klawe, M., 138 Klein, N., 107 Kleinman, A., 75, 217, 218 Lacy, S., 212, 221, 223, 232, 233 Ladson-Billings, G., 117, 125, 126, 131 Lankshear, C., 233

Index

198

Lather, P., 11, 38, 52, 140, 142, 181, 183–184 Lawrence, L., 54 Lawry, J., 138 Layder, D., 140 Lee, M., 77, 78 Lessard, H., 29, Lewis, A., 107 Ling, M., 105 Lira, E., 73, 74 Literacy The Skin of Memory as public literacy, 221 Literacy workers of memory, 222 reconciliation as collective acts of literacy, 214, 227, 230 Llanillos, L., 80, 86 Lock, M., 218 Loewen, J., 118 Lugones, M., 164, 176, 207 MacDonald, V., 113 Macedo, D., 133 MacLure, M., 183 Majalahti, E., 112 Malinche, malinchismo, 46, 47, 50 Maloney, E., 109 Marcus, G., 181 Martin-Baro, I., 79 Mauer, M., 177 Media studies, 125, 127–128 “Race, Class media and Chicago”, 123, 125 Meiners, E., 37, 232 Melville, S., 184 Memory collective memory, 73, 84 forgetting and loss, 73, 211–212 traumatic memory, 76 collective trauma, 78, 82 Memorial freezing, 80 Memory-keeper, 80 Memory and mourning, 3–4, 211 bridge objects, 219–222, 225, 227 The Skin of the Memory community public art project, 220 Memory recuperation process, 227 chronology of loss and pain, 218 “Memory product”, 233 “subjectification”, 152 Menchu, R., 85 Mestiza consciousness, 207 Michaels, S., 155 Mishler, E., 186 Moulian, T., 73, 74 Mourning, 4

Index

199

as a collective practice, 219, 230 Myers, T., 36, 52 Nadar, L., 164 Naples, N., 177 Narrative limitations of narrative/stories, 6–8 philosophy, 207 use of narrative, 163–164 Narvaez, L., 231 Nhat Hanh, T., 16, Nias, J., 112 Niedzwiecki, J., 112 Nora, P., 79 Ogden, R., 7 Ojibwe Language Immersion School, 59 Orozco, I., 231 Owens, C., 6 Paechter, C., 146 Pantoja, J., 75 Paris, E., 214 Pateman, C., 28, 29 Patterson, D., 102 Paz, O., 51 Peacock, T., 62, 70 Pedagogy alternative pedagogies, 114 art as collective pedagogy of reconciliation, 211 city as educator [ciudad educadora], 226 collective civic pedagogy, 75, 212, 219, 223, 227 culturally relevant pedagogy, 125, 131 Pennebaker, J., 79 Pestanas, D., 233 Pestanas, M., 233 Phillips, D., 185 Picart, C., 183 Piontek, T., 183 Pocklington, T. 52, 55 Polyvocality, 207–208 Popkewitz, T., 183 Poverty, 19–61 anti-poverty activists, 26 anti-poverty activism, 25 poverty pimps, 161, 167 welfare-to-work programs, 28 Power, 138–139 Praxis, 1, 5, 119, 125, 181, 183, 206. Pre-service teachers/educators, 118, 120 Prison industrial complex 162, 164, 166, 168, 171, 176–178,

Index

200

see also description 30 Days of Arts and Education on Women’s Incarceration, 170–174 Puerto Rican Cultural Center, 168 Queer, queerness, 5, 44–45, 50, 143, 163, 169 Race Race and prison industrial complex, 165, 177–178 youth critiques of, 127–128 Racism, 65, 92, 132 anti-racist practices, 95–98, 169 media stereotypes and youth discussion, 128–129 Rapping, E., 54 Reagon, B., 162 Reconciliation, 214–215, 230–231, 233 Reigler, A., 93 Reparations, 230–231 legal reparations, 82 Research as advocacy, 181–182 community-based research, 22, 36–39, 135 equity based research, 136 heterosexism and homophobia in research, 143, 154–155 intervention research, 140, 153–154 participatory action research, 22–45, 137, 181 Researchers as informants, 141, 142 Resistance institutional resistance to gender equity, 144–147, 154–155 youth resistance to gender equity, 148–151 youth resistance to dominant ideological structures, 96–99, 112–116, 125–126, 128–130 Reyes, A., 220 Rhee, J., 184 Riano-Alcala, P., 2, 11, 86, 230, 232–234 Riddell, S., 150 Rimstead, R., 15, 16 Riquelme, H., 87 Robben, A., 79 Rodriguez, C., 232 Rojas, P., 73, Rojas, Paz, 177 Ross, A., 110 Ross, C., 144 Sabogal, E., 217 Salcedo, D., 217, 219, 222, 232, 234 Sanabria, R., 161, 163, 166–168 Sanchez, G., 232 Sanchez, L., 232 Sanders, M., 2, 10 Sandoval, C., 37, 39, 40, 45, 176

Index

201

Sarasohn, D., 132 Schofield, J., 138 Schools alternative schooling project CORP: Using City as Classroom, description, 121–125 Urban Odyssey description, 91–93 alternative adult education project, description, 164–168 Waadookodaading, description, 59, 64–70 heteronormative spaces, 143 public spaces dominated by “private practices”, 135, 151–155 Small school movement, 121 Self-determination policy (1970s), 63 Self-directed learning, 25 Sen, R., 132 Shilling, C., 144 Sidell, E., 133 Smith, D., 146, 163 Smithies, C., 181–184 Social wounds, 217–218. Sohmer, R., 155 Solidarity, 18, 78 Sommer, D., 6 Sontag, S., 6 Spivak, G., 183 Spring, J., 117 Stacey,}., 169, 178, 183 State violence 9/11 2001, 130, 189–209, Stronach, I., 183 Stoval, D., 2 “Studying up”, 164, 166 Sutton, R., 135, 138 Teacher education, 118 Technology access to Internet to survive poverty, 28 “Computer expert” as a gendered category, 153 gendered practices within K-12 education, 135–136, 144–151 Torres, C., 126, 131 Trimble, S., 109 Truer, A., 61, 62 Tuhiwai-Smith, L., 5, 7, 37, 38, 168, 175, 177, 178 Tupper, A., 51, 55 Upitis, R., 138 Van der Veer, G., 77 Van Maanen, J., 183, 164 Velasquez, A., 233 Velez, J., 233 Villa, M., 232

Index

202

Visweswaran, K., 140, 142, 186 Walcott, R., 107 Walden, S., 217 Wall, J., 133 Weiss, L., 117 West, C., 128 Whyte, J., 135, 140 Willis, P., 110, 126 Wills, M., 232 Wilson, P., 70 Woolcott, H., 95 Wydra, A., 86 Yeatman, A., 29 Youth consumption practices as symbolic work, 110, 111 identity formation and the culture of consumption, 108–109, 112, 125–126 problem, 106 resistance to dominant ideological structures, 96–99, 112–116, 125–126, 128– 130 Speaker’s corner, 107 Zinn, H., 117, 118