Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice

Toward a Politics of Hope

Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina, Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315421513
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In increasing numbers, qualitative researchers are leaving their ivory tower perches and entering the fray, focusing their research and actions on the promotion of social justice. In this tightly edited volume of original articles stemming from the 2008 International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, leading figures in qualitative research demonstrate the potential for the research tradition to make contributions to the betterment of humankind.

Section III

Human Rights and Radical Performance

Chapter 8 Dangerous Ethnography

D. Soyini Madison

Northwestern University

The Merriam-Webster pocket electronic dictionary describes “dangerous” as an adverb, defining it first as: (1) hazardous, perilous (a dangerous slope); and second as: (2) able or likely to inflict injury (a dangerous man)

—Madison

I. Three Vignettes

1. It was 1988, my first year teaching at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. My advisor, Dwight Conquergood, had flown in from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to give final approval of what I hoped would be the last draft of my dissertation. The dissertation needed to be completed within a few weeks for me to be awarded the Ph.D. that year and to be promoted from lecturer to assistant professor at UNC (this was the agreement UNC mandated on my hire). While Dwight was managing all-nighters proofing dissertation chapters at my kitchen table and I was running back and forth between my study and the kitchen giving him chapter after revised chapter, hot off the computer, one night we took a break from the intensity of dissertation deadline madness and starting talking about the nature of fieldwork and the notion of a “dangerous ethnography.”

Earlier that morning, Dwight went to campus with me to talk to a group of people who were interested in his fieldwork with Chicago street gangs. At the end of his presentation, the familiar question rose again: “Professor Conquergood, you are involved in very dangerous work with some very dangerous characters—are you safe?” Dwight, affectionately referred to in those days as the “Indiana Jones” of performance studies, was asked versions of this question time after time. At my kitchen table that night, he slowly shook his head and quietly said, “With these communities and entire families in peril, everyone is more worried about the lone white man.”

2. Ten years later, in 1998, as an associate professor I was on my way to Ghana, West Africa, to conduct fieldwork with local human rights activists. Before I left for Ghana, the investigative television news magazine 60 Minutes aired a feature on a traditional cultural practice in a particular region of Ghana where the reporter depicted innocent women and girls being forced and condemned to village shrines where they were placed in bondage as reparation for a crime committed by a family member, usually a male. After the 60 Minutes program, when I mentioned to certain individuals that I was going to Ghana to research human rights in the rural areas, the response was “Be careful, Soyini, it is dangerous there. They steal women and put them in shrines.” An entire country had been reduced to a unique location with no critical questions regarding the 60 Minutes representation or concern for the women and girls reported.

3. Now, in 2008, as a full professor, I remember a transatlantic phone call from my student Hannah Blevins several years ago. I was in Ghana continuing my fieldwork on human rights and local activism and Hannah was in southern Appalachia in the last stages of her fieldwork to complete her dissertation on the cultural economy of the coal mining community and black lung disease. Hannah called from Tennessee to tell me she was going down into one of the mines that had recently been closed. Her purpose was to see for herself where so many miners had worked and died. I was silent, but my immediate thought was, “No, you cannot, it is too dangerous.” Sensing my fear through the phone, Hannah said it would be safe. She said experienced miners would guide her and protect her through the passageways of the mine. We talked for a bit. Hannah did go deep into the mine and completed a brilliant dissertation. But while she was thousands of feet below ground in a closed mine—to go where the miners had gone, to enter the risky knowledge of the body—I was on the other side of the Atlantic thinking of her and in fear of the danger.

II. Flipping the Script on Danger: Danger in Reverse

What if we stop for a moment and rethink the “dangerous”? What if we were to consider putting the dangerous in reverse? Instead of conventionally positioning the dangerous inside the field, what might happen if we think of ourselves as being dangerous? What if danger is no longer somewhere “out there” in the field? What if we carry danger with us, embody it, and carry it with us into the field? Consider the option that we, ourselves, could be dangerous. Consider what it might mean to be an agent of danger, what it might mean to become dangerous ethnographers doing dangerous ethnography. “Flip the script” and reposition the dangerous from individuals or communities that are and can be dangerous to some of us (i.e., a street gang member, a shrine in the Third World, a restricted coal mine) to now include the structures of power that generate and sustain what is systematically dangerous to all of us: systematic poverty, the machinery of imperialism, structures of homophobia, and phallocentric power. What if we were dangerous to the force of these dangers? What if we were dangerous to the systematic abuse of power? What if we were to be perpetrators of danger to that which is dangerous to our universal well-being?

The street gang member, a village shrine, and a restricted coal mine are dangers at the surface; structures of urban poverty, phallocentrism, imperialism, and homophobia are dangers at the root. An ethnography that labors to injure the foundation and the root cause of what is dangerous and that is not diverted by its symptoms or surfaces of danger might contemplate a new appropriation of danger. We can speak truth to power and we can also be dangerous to its perpetuation and continued abuse. Don’t get me wrong: We must and should pay attention to the dangers at the tip and the surface, because they are no small matters. A troubled gang member, a shrine of slaves, and a restricted coal mine legitimately invoke fear and are dangerous at a number of levels. Both root and surface are forceful, significant, and scary. A dangerous ethnography seeks to enter surfaces, but, moreover, enters what is often hidden in plain sight—the convolutions and complications below the surface, the systems that generate and keep surfaces in place.

We will keep listening with our hearts and minds to the poignant ethnographic accounts of Darfur because the human horror is too great for us not to hear or care. A dangerous ethnography will carry those stories forth while not ignoring how oil money funds government weapons, how the militias are aligned with national and transnational exploitation, and how ignorance is warming the globe and drying up the land to spark one of the most vicious ethnic conflicts in recent history. Every story about the horror of Darfur is not only a story of human suffering that must be heard, it is also about oil and the warming of our planet. Another example of dangerous ethnography might include entering various urban dance communities to examine how everyday city life is identified, sustained, contested, and remade through the labor, imagination, and global connections of community dance dancers. A dangerous ethnography is reflected in the work of Judith Hamera, who unearthed the urban political infrastructures of dance to critique and complicate notions of difference, cosmopolitanism, the distributions of urban space, and the politics of globality and urban migration. Another example is the intimate ethnography of Della Pollock and her retelling of birth stories, documenting them as reperformances of how men and women recast the ritual of giving birth. Within the poetics of birth narratives, Pollock lends a penetrating analysis of U.S. medical discourse, reproductive technologies, and the tensive intersections of maternity, sexuality, and reproduction as well as how pain is constituted and represented.

My plea is for us not only to speak truth to power but also to put power in peril, in jeopardy, to endanger it. This all comes quite frankly from being weary of being angry. I have made up my mind in my golden years that I shall aim to be a danger to dangerous power, from the tip to the root, from the surface to the foundation.

III. The Body as Bearing Witness

I will argue that a dangerous ethnography does not begin with interventions on political economies or structures of the state or the nation, on global capitalism or corporate greed, or even on ideologies of neoliberalism or fundamentalism—these are the targets of a dangerous ethnography (with some complication) but they are not the starting point, not the inspiration. My inspiration for a dangerous ethnography begins with performance—that is, the body in performance.

In performance studies, we do a lot of talking about the body. For performance ethnographers, this means we must embrace the body not only as the feeling/sensing home of our being—the harbor of our breath—but the vulnerability of how our body must move through the space and time of another—transporting our very being and breath—for the purpose of knowledge, for the purpose of realization and discovery. Body knowledge, knowledge through the body, is evidence of the present. It is the truth that I exist with you—with myself—right here, right now. Further, it is evidence that I am not anywhere, I am not nowhere, I am not over yonder, I am not absent. I am not dead. I am alive here and now and I am vulnerable to this feeling/sensing present moment. My body breathes here unmediated and unprotected. The Other can reach across me and touch my wounds, can feel the beating of my heart, can hear my nervous breathing, can strike me down and make my blood flow.

This is intersubjective vulnerability in existential and ontological order, because bodies rub against one another flesh to flesh in a marked present and where we live on and between the extremes of life and death. Another can love me and another can kill me; I can love and kill in the corporeal present tense of another. I cannot live or die in my body’s absence—I can only die and live in the present moment, in the presence of my body, and where my body is present. The immortality of the soul withstanding, we end when our bodies end and we begin when our bodies begin—body presence with another is fraught with intersubjective risks.

So what is my point? The point is that where my body is I am vulnerable to the radical extremes of life and death; the point is that where my body is I am vulnerable to the disgust and desire of all my senses; and finally, the point is that because my body is vulnerable to life and death in this particular ethnographic moment as well as the penetrating depths of its sensual meanings, I am living evidence that this moment, in this time and space, does exist and I am a surviving witness to its living realities of life and death and the infinite in-between. This is why, for better and for worse, we say: “Are you safe?” “Is it dangerous?” “I am afraid for you.”

So how is the body specifically implicated in a dangerous ethnography? The body must testify, it must speak—it must provide a report—it must bear witness to the surfaces and the foundations, the symptoms and the causes.

“What should I do with what I have witnessed?” I have strong responses to what I witnessed during my fieldwork. These responses demanded that I be responsible for providing an opportunity for others to also gain the ability to respond in some form.¹ I bear witness and in bearing witness I do not have the singular response-ability for what I witness but the responsibility of invoking a response-ability in others to what was seen, heard, learned, felt, and done in the field and through performance. As Kelly Oliver states, “We have an obligation not only to respond but also to respond in a way that opens up rather than closes off the possibility to respond by others” (2001, pp. 18–19). Steven Durland says, “A person who bears witness to an injustice takes responsibility for that awareness. That person may then choose to do something or stand by, but he may not turn away in ignorance” (1987, p. 65).

Response, response-ability, and responsibility became aligned with advocacy and ethics. To be an advocate is to feel a responsibility to exhort and appeal on behalf of another or for another’s cause with the hope that still more others will gain the ability to respond to your advocacy agenda. Being an advocate has a different intent than speaking in the manner of a ventriloquist, in the sense of muting Other voices to only amplify one’s own. Being an advocate is to actively assist in the struggles of others, or (and) it is learning the tactics, symbols, and everyday forms of resistance of which the subaltern enact but “do not speak” (Spivak, 1988) so that they may provide platforms for which their struggles can be known and heard.² As advocates, we aim for a cycle of responses that will set loose a stream of response-abilities that will lead to something more, something of larger philosophical and material effects.

In addition, the position of advocate and the labor of advocacy are riddled with the pleasure and burden of representation that is always already so much about ethics. Advocates represent who and what they are advocating for: their names, narratives, histories, and their logics of persuasion as well as imagining what more is needed in the service of advocacy. All this requires labor that is entrenched in power relations and representations that are inextricable to ethics. Representation happens at different points along power’s spectrum—we are all “vehicles and targets” of power’s contagion and omnipresence.³ As advocates, surrounded by the far and wide entanglements of power’s disguises and infinite forms, we aim to invoke a response to its consequences—a response-ability—to its operations. In doing the work of advocacy, whether we consider ethics or not, it is always already present within the horizons of representation and the machinations of power. Because ethics requires responsibility (and the ability to respond), it is inherently antithetical to apathy.

If apathy cannot rest beside the ethical responsibility to respond and if ethics also includes providing opportunities for others to gain access to the ability to respond, then performance can form a vibrant and efficacious partnership with ethics. Ethics and advocacy now pave the way as we move from the field to the stage. Stage performance becomes a dynamic space where response-ability, advocacy, and ethnics are heightened and ultimately culminate.

The fieldwork data travel to the public stage with the hope that the performance will invoke a response (ability) among a group or spectators. It is said that theater and performance show ourselves to ourselves in ways that help us recognize our behavior and life worlds as well as the behavior and life worlds of o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• In Memoriam
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice: Toward a Politics of Hope
• Section I: Ethics, Evidence, and Social Justice
• Section II: Qualitative Inquiry in Post-Disaster America
• Section III: Human Rights and Radical Performance
• Coda Mentoring Relationships: Creating a Future for Qualitative Inquiry
• Index
• About the Authors