Issues in Decolonizing and Feminist Research Methodologies

[researchmethods]

Finding creativity and nuance in research methodologies: the cross stitching of research production and arts based methods

My bookshelf holds nine sketchbooks, and not a single one is entirely filled. Some I have totally abandoned, and keep as reflections of my past self and experiences. The rest are cross-stitches of ongoing negotiations with the complexities of life. What remains consistent throughout my leaps between and through the vague characterizations I attach to each of my artistic pieces are the representations of my ongoing battles as a Yemeni woman. I have remained quite hesitant to link my art to my research, even as it becomes clearer that each complements the other, and that art contains the possibility of deepening academia’s limited understandings of the lived experiences of Yemeni women. I want to examine the linkages that can be created between research production and arts based research methods, and the possibilities of opening up research to deeper affective and contexualized understandings of research subjects everyday realities and experiences. Throughout my analysis, I bring into conversation personal art pieces that have been part and parcel of my ongoing research on shifting gender relations in Yemen. 

In her essay “Feminist Performance: The Body Grotesque as Transgressive Site/Sight,” Pam Patterson examines the possibility for performance art to act as research methodology with transgressive potential highlighted by a feminist praxis (Patterson, 2008). Patterson’s analysis centres on the body grotesque as a feminist site/sight, and further places it within the transgressive potential of performance art. She highlights that the manner through which performance engages with the body opens up space for transformative affective and narrative story telling (389). Furthermore, the visual nature of performance in a non-linear and multi-media fashion acts as a non-conventional research dissemination process. Thus, performance holds the potential to shift dominant research methods by bringing research to life. This can be extended on to other visual media productions, but with varying considerations of the body politic’s role and place within the art.

Sabr, Patience. 

This piece is reflective of the immense patience I employ in my resistance against the corporeal control women negotiate with in Yemeni society. My mother always repeated the word “sabr” (patience) to my sister and I at times of hardship. The repetition of “sabr” over the shrouded body is representative of its constant resonance, but also the ways in which patience opens up spaces of agency in resistance. 

Patterson notes that the transgressive potential of images lies in “rendering the suppressed visible” (Patterson, 390). In engagements with the body in performance, disruptions to normative and dominant representations can occur, as it allows for a material, social, and discursive (de)construction. Yet, these possibilities can be severely restricted by limited readings by those perceiving and engaging with the performance, despite the affective and empathetic promise it holds. More dangerously, performance could be co-opted and neutralized when it enters the mainstream. However, she stresses the importance of contextualizing performance art in research, specifically where it is being created and consumed. The possibilities of a violent misreading are only heightened when the cultural context in which the art is being experienced occurs in sanitized and de-politicized environments that take little stock in the possibilities for narrative shifts and re-tellings within research production. 

Waga’ qalb, Heart ache. 

Waga’ qalb (written in Arabic calligraphy in the piece) was a phrase I heard throughout my childhood, largely by the women in my life in their constant engagements with patriarchal systems and relationships. An artistic method offers a chance to share that narrative with more nuance and to explore the multiplicity present in a single experience (or phrase in this sense). 

Patterson’s urge for contextualization is especially powerful when connected to feminist and postcolonial research methods. While art has the potential to open up research, there remains a strong responsibility between the researcher and the research subjects with regards to the where, why, when, and how’s that occur in research dissemination. Art provides an affective opening, but can also be highly objectified and limited when presented in unfitting spaces. Furthermore, the use of art in research could be limited to the research process, and not expanded onto the dissemination/exhibition aspect of research production. The transformative potential of art could be utilized as a tool within and by the community, but not provided in the larger research presentations. In our inclusion of art in research methodologies, there must be a consideration for participants needs and desires, and the possibility that its transformative nature can be limited to certain spaces so as to restrict the academy’s and outsider gaze.

Patterson’s use of the body politic within performance as feminist site/sight largely engage with her own body. As such, how would her narrative shift when we consider research subjects as utilizing this performance and artistic space rather than researchers themselves? Lapum et al’s approach in their research and exhibition of experiences of open heart surgery in “The 7,024th Patient” project reveals this uneasy space between using art as a tool of understanding and participants narratives (Lapum et al, 2011). Due to the intensely affective aspect of art in research, the risk of co-option features highly. The researchers in this project engaged in an interpretation of patient narratives, and presented their narrative study in an exhibition through which viewers were able to affectively and physically engage with patients experiences. Research requires interpretations to occur at all stages, and that contains a violent risk of misinterpretation. Yet, the affective resonance of arts in research could heighten this violent engagement as readers are not only perceiving the words on a page through a specific lens, but physically and emotionally engaging with it. In considerations of the colonial histories of research production between the West and the global South, the risk of misrepresentation in arts in research must be countered with.

Sookoon, (stillness/peace). 

Sookoon is a word that I find difficulty translating in a manner reflective of its true weight in the Arabic language. I carry it with me as a counterpart to the intense anger emergent in confronting patriarchal systems. The piece is a self portrait that allows me to provide more nuance to the re-telling of my lived experiences. 

Bagele Chilisa’s chapter “Culturally Responsive Indigenous Methodologies” is especially helpful in considering the guiding frameworks in constructing an arts based research methodology that operates with a postcolonial and Indigenous framework (Chilisa, 2012). Chilisa outlines several alternative criteria to a postcolonial indigenous framework that can be applied to arts based research: fairness, positionality,, community based ethics, voice, reflexivity. These criteria focus on representing the multiple realities the participants relay, but also a deep interaction with the community in a cyclical and consistent manner. Art in research has the possibility to expand on areas of reflexivity and voice by placing the participant at the forefront, and local knowledge as central to alternative ways of being and thinking. Chilisa highlights various culturally specific methodologies that question the groundwork of knowledge making. Extending these methodologies to arts in research establishes art as an alternative manner of knowledge making but also allows for the consideration of localized Indigenous methods of story telling and knowledge making that can be extended through an artistic lens.

I consider these negotiations with regards to my own narrative, as presented through my art, that could be representative of the contextualized gendered oppression that I experience. My art builds from my own local culture and history, as my larger research relates to shifts in gender relations in South Yemen, but the story I tell is one that brings forward those narratives from a space of reflexivity and positionality. However, as I present these pieces within this review, what comes to light is the need to critically expand on the narrative presented within the artworks so as to counteract assumptions and readings that could present one’s representations as universalizing, monolithic, or victimizing. 

Works Cited:

Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous research methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Lapum, J. L., Liu, L., Church, K., Yau, T. M., Ruttonsha, P., David, A. M., & Retta, B. (2014). Arts-Informed Research Dissemination in the Health Sciences: An Evaluation of Peoples' Responses to "The 7,024th Patient" Art Installation. SAGE Open, 4(1).

Patterson, P. (2008). Feminist Performance: the body grotesque as transgressive site/sight. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10(3), 388-401.

[researchmethods]

Postcolonial Research Methodologies

In chapter 3 of her book Indigenous Research Methodologies, Bagele Chilisa questions “whose reality counts?” within mainstream (Western) research in postcolonial communities (Chilisa, 2012). Chilisa maps out the problematics in Western research methodologies in relation to communities with colonial histories and the continued marginalization of other knowledge systems within these communities. Chilisa urges a transformative undertaking in indigenous postcolonial work that accounts for colonial histories and marginalization that is further elaborated in Eshun and Madges article, “Now let me share this with you”:Exploring Poetry as a Method for Postcolonial Geography Research (Eshun & Madge, 2012). Both works question the complex power relations emergent when Western methodologies and knowledge systems are imposed on postcolonial work, and effectively chart manners by which future research can engage in a more transformative and critical methodology.

Chilisa argues that research on postcolonial societies continues to marginalize non-Western knowledge systems and research methodologies, which is largely informed by a history of colonization, imperialism and globalization. She further contends that in their universalizing logic, dominant Western research methods impose reductive binary oppositions that only silence the less powerful (Chilisa, 2012). In its enactment, Western methodologies position the first world as the “knower” and the third world as the Othered “learner.” The imposition of research methodologies that care little for contextual distinctions and apply Western categories are not only misinforming, but further reenact colonial relationships. Chilisa highlights the permeation of such logic within ethical codes concerned largely with research subject harm that privilege the individual above the community. In effort to contest such methodologies, Chilisa asks if universal research ethics could ever be applied in a manner that encompasses all knowledge systems. 

Oh, the postcolonial irony. (2015, June). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://amphilo-mus.tumblr.com/post/120794337414/oh-the-postcolonial-irony-is-just-killing-me (Originally photographed 2015, June)

Chilisa’s chapter provides critical questions on knowledge production and hegemonic research methodologies. Indeed, Western academia’s complicity in colonial histories and neoliberal capitalism today provides little to no room to engage with postcolonial indigenous research methodologies, yet that highlights our desperate need for alternative methodologies that contest dominant Western logics. While Chilisa’s chapter is valuable in its analysis and criticism, it is limited in its recommendations on strategies for movement towards a more nuanced methodology. 

To that end, Eshun and Madge’s article, “Now let me share this with you”:Exploring Poetry as a Method for Postcolonial Geography Research is instructive in its exploration of possibilities of for “escaping eurocentric world-picturing” (Eshun & Madge, 2012: 1397). They locate poetry as a methodology and tool to restrict Western knowledge systems and epistemologies, and to open up space for narrative forms engaging in deep transformative politics that are increasingly localized and contextualized. Their mobilization and problematization of poetry as a postcolonial methodological tool reveals the imbrication of the politics of colonial language and the dialectics of postcolonial writing.

Yet it further discloses the issues of who speaks, who is heard, and how voices are conceived in knowledge production. Poetry, as Eshun and Madge argue “writes the world in particular ways,” highlighting that despite efforts to move towards more accountability and responsibility our methodologies are still tightly interlocked in systems of power and domination. Inclusion of certain voices will incontrovertibly result in the exclusion of others, which heavily shapes the ability to discern the complexities of specific localities. The politics of “re-representing” community voices and the construction of subjectivities, contend Eshun and Madge, are embroiled in questions of power and marginality. Such entanglements cannot be addressed by the reductive stipulation that qualitative work should “give voice” as it fails to consider that the ‘giving’ itself is reliant on colonial and hierarchical power structures. Eshun and Madge critically question marking one’s positionality and self reflexivity within postcolonial work, highlighting that it cannot surmount the power imbalances in research. While it allows for more accountability within the research process, simply stating one’s location without critical examinations of the politics of subject production within postcoloniality does not “shift centres of knowledge production” (Eshun & Madge, 2012:1420). Indeed, as they highlight, assuming that we are in a position of responsibility, and forcing such determinants on research communities risks effacing agency. This difficulty is apparent in Eshun and Madge’s cautioning that poetry is just as susceptible to exploitation, and cannot be assumed to inherently hold transformative power. Its transformative potential lies in the researchers ability and drive to critically engage with community, move away from colonial binaries, and attentiveness to “intra-community dynamics of power” (Eshun & Madge, 2012:1416).

I, too, am Oxford [Photograph found in Oxford]. (2014, March 11). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://itooamoxford.tumblr.com/post/79158411777 (Originally photographed 2014, March 11)

In work on communities with colonial histories it is critical to be mindful of who does the speaking within the communities themselves. Postcolonial nationalisms marginalized certain voices, along gender, sexuality, and race lines amongst other systems of power. What is critical to acknowledge within both readings examinations of postcolonial research is that denunciation of colonial binaries must also recognize power imbalances within communities themselves, and that glorifying ‘native’ voices can fail to note which voices are empowered to speak while others are silenced. A representation of such power contextualizations is the articulation of the ‘third-world woman’ who as Gayatri Spivak asserts is a figuration of the violent displacement of the woman in the postcolonial context who is entrapped between “subject-constitution and object-formation” (Spivak, 1999:304). In the process of subject-formation of women in the global South, we risk articulating “women” as a monolithic and homogenous group, and in the process silence, erase, and disregard agency and the complex interplay of power. As we work to articulate the politics of subject formation of our research participants, Eshun and Madge heed us to make visible the challenges and complexities that emerge in our research process. 

In conclusion, Eshun and Madge point to the misgivings of the constant questioning of one’s research, and the potential for a “critical paralysis” and inaction as a result. In our push to be more accountable and self reflexive, we at times enter a space of immobility, composed of fear and insecurity that our work risks (re)enacting colonial research relationships. Yet, Eshun and Madge highlight that acting on such self doubt opens up space for dialogue. Remaining self critical is incredibly important, yet when it results in inaction it does nothing to shift the hegemonic nature of research production. We must do the work to then proceed to engage in critical dialogue. Despite its obvious nature, such a statement is necessary to break out of the paralyzing cyclical tendencies that graduate students engaged in social justice work tend to fall into.

How many Postcolonial Digital Humanists Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb? (2013, April 10). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://40.media.tumblr.com/7665fc903b1bc2f58f9415342a6ade39/tumblr_ml207tCfu61s79o1mo1_1280.png (Originally photographed 2013, April 10)

Works Cited:

Chilisa, B. (2011). Whose reality counts? Research methods in question. In Indigenous Research Methodologies (pp. 73-95). SAGE publications.

Eshun, G., & Madge, C. (2012). “Now let me share this with you”: Exploring Poetry as a Method for Postcolonial Geography Research. Antipode, 44(4), 1395-1428.

How many Postcolonial Digital Humanists Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb? (2013, April 10). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://40.media.tumblr.com/7665fc903b1bc2f58f9415342a6ade39/tumblr_ml207tCfu61s79o1mo1_1280.png (Originally photographed 2013, April 10)

I, too, am Oxford [Photograph found in Oxford]. (2014, March 11). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://itooamoxford.tumblr.com/post/79158411777 (Originally photographed 2014, March 11)

Oh, the postcolonial irony. (2015, June). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from http://amphilo-mus.tumblr.com/post/120794337414/oh-the-postcolonial-irony-is-just-killing-me (Originally photographed 2015, June)

Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.