BOOK ETC: INTERSECTIONALITY AND OPEN DIALOGUE
INTERSECTIONALITY AND OPEN DIALOGUES
IN FPAR
MY SUMMARY FROM SOME SOURCES:
Dimensions in each human and their voices cannot be separated, like a woman in Indonesia was intersected with social, cultural, religious values and norms, patriarchal values, law norms etc.
A human is not only intersected: female and male, poor and rich, heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual sex, well-educated or less-educated, white or black, scholar or activist, etc. These multi-dimensions are influence each other and related to each other.
By exploring the tensions, we will get further understanding the privileges and more silenced voices before creating social transformations:
Considering power and privilege each member within a group to generate more voices and aspiration. The similar power of each group will enhance more resilience voices to be dig because researcher should create “safe space” for their participants or co-researchers for instance, group of HIV-positive women, a group of NGO workers, a group of health workers or a group of policy makers. If we mingle this group to be one group, silenced voices vs resilience, oppression vs domination, power vs powerless might not be optimally understood.
The challenge then, according to Wildman and Davis is that “to end subordination, one must first recognize one’s own privilege” (1996, pp20) p 10
The process of engaging a dialogue in order to create new and transformative knowledge and aspiration as a central concern are accompanied dilemmas and challenges.
“Creating an “open dialogue” and participatory meansà often shifting from
· a researcher-participant dialogue to one research collaborators,
· a researcher-participant dialogue to one involving co-researchers.
· participating insiders from a local community are invited to collaborate with outsider researchers
in addressing a social issue or problem of interest of both and and in most cases, with particular consequences for the community and also in ameliorating rather than social transformation despite an overt commitment to social change “ (Lykes, 2012)
Feminist PAR argued that intersectionality is vital part in understanding multidimensional elements in a person, a condition or a study case. For instance, people with HIV-positive might be discriminated because of: personal, social, cultural and institutional discrimination towards HIV in health setting or self-imposed discrimination of themselves in accessing PMTCT services or their poverty or their young age.
1. Reid, Colleen and Frisby, Wendy, 2008, Continuing the journey: Articulating dimensions of feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) in Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (Ed), THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ACTION RESEARCH-Participative inquiry and practice. SAGE: London
A significant challenge for FR has been the development of methodologies for studying multiple forms of marginalization. Intersectional theory is based on the ideas that different dimensions of social life cannot be separated into discrete or pure strands (Bran and Phoenix, 2004:76)
**Brah, A and Phoenix, A (2004). Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5(3):75-86
It suggests that we need to move beyond seeing ourselves and others as single points in some specified set of dichotomies, mate and female, white and black, straight or gay, scholar or activist, powerful or powerless (Mc Call, 2005)
**McCall, L (2005) Inner-city Kids: Adolescents confront life and violence in an Urban community
Rather, “we need to imagine ourselves as existing at the intersection of multiple identities, all of which influence one another and together shape our continually changing experience and interaction (Brydon-Miller, 2004: 9)
** Brydon-Miller M (2004). ‘The terrifying truth: interrogating systems of power and privilege and choosing to act’, in M. Brydon-Miller, P.Maguire and A. Mclntyre (eds), Traveling Companions: Feminism, Teaching and Action Research, Westpport CT: Praeger, pp 3-19
Power shapes and is shaped across these intersections and how critical such analyses are for understanding the complexities of women’s lives and conceptualizing meaning full possibilities for activism and social change (Reid pp 98)
Exploring these tensions can help reveal privilege, especially when we remember that the intersection is multidimensional and not fixed, including intersection of both subordination and privilege (Wildman and Davis 1996: cited in Brydon-Miller:2004:9)
**Wildman, S.M. and Davies, A.D (1996) ‘Making systems of privilege visible’ in S. M. Wildman (ed), Privilege Revealed: How invisible preference undermines America, New York: New York University Press.
Affirming attending to and authorizing the voice of the oppressed is dependent on our ability to realize our own first-world researcher roles as oppressors (Brabeck, 2004)
**Brabeck, K (2004) ‘Testimonio: bridging feminist and participatory action research to create new spaces collectivity’ in M. Brydon-Miller, P.Maguire and A. Mclntyre (eds), Traveling Companions: Feminism, Teaching and Action Research, Westpport CT: Praeger, pp 3-19
Through open dialogues with both our participants and ourselves, we can begin to understand the nature of oppression, domination and exploitation as they intersect and interrelated with gender, race, class, and other forms of advantages and disadvantages pp.98
Guiding questions
How can intersectionality be considered and what complexities and tensions could this create?
How does intersectionality shape identities, experiences, and relationships, and how does this shift over time?
What non-colonial collaborative processes are in place to build relations and work across differences in gender, class, race, culture, sexuality, ablebodiedness and other markers of difference?
2. Mary Brydon-Miller, 2004, “The Terrifying truth interrogating systems of power and privilege & choosing to act. In Brydon-Miller, M., Maguire, P., & McIntyre, A. (Eds.). (2004). Traveling companions: Feminism, teaching, and action research. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Feminism also been accused of overlooking the multiple source of power and privilege that function to create the complex webs of power relationships that, overall, have served to increase my advantages over others (Mo hanty, 1997) pp 8
As Maguire notes, “Because our voices and stories cannot be extracted from our social, cultural locations in the world, the interactions of gender, multiple locations, interlocking oppressions, and voice become apparent” (2001, p 63)
I can choose to mask this fact, allowing others to control the decision-making process, or I can choose to act, invoking my power in ways that I hope will be empowering to others. Pp8
Powerful and powerless: frightened and fearless. pp 8
Rather than see ourselves and others as single points in some specified set of dichotomies: male or female, white or black, straight or gay, scholar or activists, powerful or powerless, this image allows us to imagine ourselves as existing at the intersection of multiple identities, all of which influence one another and together shape continually changing experience and interactions. Pp9.
These individual systems of power and the ways in which they intersect with those of others allows each of us to be both privileged and oppressed, with the potential to use these two aspects of our experience as counterpoints to one another, each informing our understanding of and response to the other.
These tensions “can help reveal privileges, especially when we remember that the intersection is multidimensional, including intersection of both subordination and privilege” (Wildman and Davis, 1996, pp22)
Despite these multiple positionalities, these of us who are white, America, educated and upper-middle class, whether male or female, enjoy a level of protection from experiences of subordination that we rarely acknowledge.
“When we look at privilege we see several things. First, the characteristics of the privileged group define the societal norm often benefiting those in the privileged group. Second, privileged group members can rely on their privilege is rarely seen by the holder of the privilege (Wildman & David, 1995, p. 13). P. 9
Living at intersection
The challenge then, according to Wildman and Davis is that “to end subordination, one must first recognize privilege” (1996, pp20) p 10
Third reflects Wildman and Davis’s third point regarding privilege: that it is seldom recognized by those who hold it. Howe, then, am I to bring such experiences of power and privilege to light? One strategy is to try to recast experiences of powerlessness by taking on the role of the more powerful character and attempting to examine the moment from that perspectives. If I take the example of the two male faculty members discussion my behavior after a meeting, I wonder if either of them was really even aware of my presence. Or the faculty colleagues who said he thought I enjoyed arguing- what might have informed his perception when I experienced the moment as one of brutalizing harassment?
Pp 11
The terrifying Truth (and a more hopeful final thought)
The terrifying truth is that we have a choice. We can continue to be immobilized by the fear of making mistakes and can hide behind a veil of cynicism claiming that change is impossible, or we can choose to act, knowing that we will misjudge situations, fail to see alternatives, and be faced with the unanticipated negative consequences of our actions. It’s Pandora’s box. But like Pandora’s box, look a bit deeper and there is hope. That is at the core of my work as a participatory action researcher
I have faith in their intelligence, kind-hearthedness, and basic sense of justice. Occasionally, I am proven wrong. Fare more often, however, I find that in approaching others with this expectation, my faith, my faith is well founded. I believe in the possibility of change and I am realize that I am not responsible for bringing about the change by myself but for taking what action I can with the conviction that in the long run change is the result of shared action. And I choose to act. Pp 16
3. Lykes, M. B., & Crosby, A. (2014). Feminist practice of action and community research. In hesse Biber (eds) Feminist research practice: A primer, 145-181.
A standpoint encompassing feminism and community based participatory action research argued that all ‘who are engaged in the research process are “knowers” and indeed they co-construct knowledge together pp 146
How to develop and engage these dialogical relationships in order to create new and transformative form of knowledge is a central concern, it is these processes with their accompanying dilemmas and challenges.
Exploring feminist practices in action and community
Dialogical relationship
Feminist practice action and community research challenges these assumptions of objectivity and seeks to develop participatory processes among all research collaborators, often shifting from a researcher-participant dialogue to one research collaborators, often shifting from a researcher-participant dialogue to one involving co-researchers. Thus, participating insiders from a local community are invited to collaborate with outsider researchers in addressing a social issue or problem of interest of both and and in most cases, with particular consequences for the community. Postcolonial feminism further contests the borders of these collaborative relationships, in light of the growing numbers within the community-and identity based groups that are naming problems and are seeking human and social capital within and beyond their borders, in order to cooperatively generate knowledge and to forge action to redress injustices. Pp 159-160
Forming relationships
Each researcher was challenged forming relationships, identifying partners to develop “safe enough” spaces in which potential participant (for Maguire and H.S) and co-researcher (for Lykes) could value their own diverse strengths and capacities, and with whom outsider and insider co-researcher and could engage in reflective critical practices that problematize the matrices of power, privilege and dominates that circulated throughout the social worlds of the colonized pp 160-161
Feminists have characterized these research relationships in a variety of ways, such as “friendship” or a”family (Mclnytyre & Lykes, 2004) which stretch the boundaries of a hypothesized insider-outsider dichotomy. Pp 161
Designing the project pp 163
In the research design process, community-based and participatory and action researcher must decide how they will proceed to gather information systematically organize it and interpret what has been found. In so doing, the co-researchers may decide to gather information from a large group of participants, in addition to those individuals already identified as participants or co-researchers.
the Photo PAR process in the Rural Mayan community of Chajul, Guatemala (Lykes, 2001) reflects such as iterative research design process.
There, Lykes collaborated with a local organization with which she had had prior involvement, in order to 20 Mayan women co-researchers to participate int o the PHOTO PAR process (Lykes, 1999).
My note:
Training for the project involved a series of participating workshop through which they designed the research. Initially, I initiate what I want to do to build group consciousness, like watching inspired HIV positive women and they initiated to share about their life and motivation of life with HIV by talking, writing words or drawing. After maintain group consciousness, we tried boiled up “ a collage” HIV vulnerability barriers and solution of accessing PMTCT service. Within groups, only two of them accessing PMTCT through role play, music etc.
Interpreting finding within and across differences
Feminist engaged in community and action research projects strive to engage local participants and co-researchers in all projects, and sometimes the most challenging stage in this process in the analysis and interpretation of data pp. 169
These interpretative processes result in products that are frequently performed in public spaces by the co-researchers.
Generating and Analyzing data
Feminist practice of action and community research necessitates the involvement of multiple parties, data are thus generated through highly participatory processes
Mapping as a resource in data collection
Creative techniques as resources for data generation and analysis: pp 164-169
· Mapping –community mapping
· Drawings-individual and collective drawings
· Creative techniques writing community and action research can be organized along these axes: corporal expression- role playing, dramatic play- drawing-all form sof physical creativity “outside of ourselves”-drawing, models made with newspaper or other materials, colleges and verbal techniques, the playing with words in ways, storytelling.
Concluding Reflections: Challenges Towards the Future
This chapter provide examples of how the intersects of feminist and community-based participatory action research provide a rich border space in which to engage the community in knowledge creation and challenge systems of power and structures of domination. This final section discusses two sets of ongoing challenges in this work that can move the work described forward in new directions. First, a challenge remains in linking the community to broader processes of organizing towards societal transformation; and second, despite discourses of reflexivity and the concretion of knowledge, power tends to remain firmly in the hands of academic co-researchers. The questions of how to” work the hypen” (Fine, 1994), discussed earlier in this chapter, remains a central dilemma to those who are situated within academic institutions of the North. It is a dilemma that still requires the shifting of margins to center that bell hooks (1984/200) pressed for nearly three decades ago, and the related decentering of privilege. Pp171
Despite an overt commitment to social change, all too often, co-researchers working within the context described throughout this chapter engage in ameliorative rather than transformative practices. Pp 171
*Ameliorative: to make or become better, more bearable, or more satisfactory; improve
In the edited volume feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism (2011), indigenous feminist activist Jesicca Yee and her colleagues have turned a similarly critical lens onto feminism itself, particularly as it is taught within the academy. This questioning of the institutionalization of feminism calls for the problematizing of the position of power and privilege of those of us situated within academia-and for a decentering of knowledge production into the community itself, which remains a central tenet of action research.
These actions of critique and recentering are at once radical, political, and critical; and they have as their aim the construction of knowledge and the development of praxis that are geared towards the creation of social justice by communities themselves, as well as a radical decentering of notions of academic privileges. Through such processes, community research can engage feminism in order to progress towards a next iteration: the further development of postcolonial feminist action and community research. As we continue our work with rural Mayan women in Guatemala, we are challenged:
1) To center the knowledge they have generated in documenting and naming the effects of war, including the materials conditions of impoverishment that constrain their community’s life circumstances
2) To support Maya women’s activism through social movement in Guatemala and transnationality,
4. Lykes and Hersberg, 2012, Participatory Action Research and Feminism: Social Inequalities and Transformation Practices IN Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy, ed. Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis. SAGE publications
The work requires creating ”safe enough” spaces that strive to be inclusive and supportive of these developing relationships: it necessitates valuing strengths, capabilities, social capital, and resilience.pp8
Some of these efforts press beyond the inclusion of diverse voices, engaging gender as a social construct and a tool for change. They seek to be sufficiently challenging to engage us in reflective critical practices that problematize the matrices of power, privilege and domination that circulate among us and in our social worlds. Some are grounded in feminist theory and discourse, reacting towards transformative praxis through building movement that support individual and social change.
Feminist theories have critical role to play in action research with transformative goals (Frisby, Maguire and Reid, 2009)
Maguire argued for the importance of reenergizing and repoliticizing participatory work. She suggested that participatory work. She suggested that participatory and action research h bring to feminist theory a challenge to act, while that feminist theory has importantly challenged action researchers to turn their critical lens towards women’s experience of oppression and marginalization as well as the important strength women bring to social change.
In FPAR participants as co-researcher, through reflectivity an in relationship, discover the limits and constraints of their personal power pp.3 1
5. WIKIGENDER, retieved from https://www.wikigender.org/wiki/intersectionality/
Intersectionality
Intersectionality (also referred to as intersectional analysis or intersectionality theory) is an analytical tool for understanding and responding to the ways gender identity intersects with and is constituted by other social factors such as race, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Theory and Feminist Thought
Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw of UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, first drew attention to the term ‘intersectionality’ in relation to race and gender theory in a 1989 article discussing the experiences of Black women in the United States. Crenshaw argues that intersectional analysis is a way to expand feminist and antiracist theory, both of which were unable to adequately address the experiences of Black women suffering from both sexual and racial discrimination. She contends that feminist theory and antiracist politics both exist on a single-axis framework which obscures or ignores the experiences of those at the intersection of race and sex. Treating racial and sexual discrimination as mutually exclusive, Crenshaw argues, leads to a problematic theoretical tendency to think of all women as white and all Blacks as men, thus erasing the experiences of those at the intersections.
Crenshaw asks us to conceptualize discrimination in an analogy to traffic.
Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.
Intersectionality as an analytical tool is used to help understand multiple forms of oppression and encourages examination of how different systems of oppression intersect and affect groups of women in different ways. In addition, feminists argue that an understanding of intersectionality is a vital element to gaining political and social equality and improving our democratic system.
References
- Bond, Johanna E. “International Intersectionality: A Theoretical and Pragmatic Exploration of Women’s International Human Rights Violations” Emory Law Journal 2003, Vol. 52 71-186.
- Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Politics and Antiracist Politics” University of Chigaco Legal Forum 1989: 139-167.
- Yuval-Davis, Nira. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics” European Journal of Women’s Studies 2006, London, Sage. Vol. 13(3) 193-209.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality
NOTE
PARTICIPATORY FEMINISM (PARFEM)
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