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-Research is used to commodify pain narratives and damage representations to reproduce oppression with the justification of the academy |
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-Tuck and Yang 14 Eve, and K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris and M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_Refusing-Research.pdf |
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-Urban communities, and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources, settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change as both colonial and flawed, because it relies upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated, and because it requires disenfranchised communities to posi-tion themselves as both singularly defective and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that “won” reparations rarely become reality, and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken.Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from com-munities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight. Academe’s demon-strated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining “itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised” (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice. At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have cho-sen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers emerge from doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to do social science. The collection of pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those on the margins as thus: No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Hooks’s words resonate with our observation of how much of social science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researcher’s voice is constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces that invite those on the margins to speak also say, “Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks, 1990, p. 343). |
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-Reject the research of the aff in conjunction with the academy – it opens us to possibilities for change not coopted by academia |
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-Tuck and Yang, 04 |
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-Eve (Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Earned her Ph.D.in Urban Education at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2008) and K Wayne (Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies, University of California, Berkeley), “R-Words: Refusing Research, pg. 232-235, RSR |
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-One might ask what is meant by the academy, and by the academy being undeserving or unworthy of some stories or forms of knowledge. For some, the academy refers to institutions of research and higher education, and the individuals that inhabit them. For others, the term applies to the relationships between institutions of research and higher education, the nation-state, private and governmental funders, and all involved individuals. When we invoke the academy, or academe, we are invoking a community of practice that is focused upon the propagation and promulgation of (settler colonial) knowledge. Thus, when we say that there are some forms of knowledge that the academy does not deserve, it is because we have observed the academy as a community of practice that, as a whole: Stockpiles examples of injustice, yet will not make explicit a commitment to social justice Produces knowledge shaped by the imperatives of the nation-state, while claiming neutrality and universality in knowledge production Accumulates intellectual and financial capital, while informants give a part of themselves away Absorbs or repudiates competing knowledge systems, while claiming limitless horizons Like the previous axiom’s question—Why collect narratives of pain?—we ask nonrhetorically, what knowledges does the academy deserve? Beyond narratives of pain, there may be language, experiences, and wisdoms better left alone by social science. Paula Gunn Allen (1998) notes that for many Indigenous peoples, “a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place” (p. 56). To apply this idea to the production of social science research, we might think of this as a differentiation between what is made public and what is kept sacred. Not everything, or even most things, uncovered in a research process need to be reported in academic journals or settings. Contrasting Indigenous relationships to knowledge with settler relationships to knowledge, Gunn Allen remarks, In the white world, information is to be saved and analyzed at all costs. It is not seen as residing in the minds and molecules of human beings, but as—dare I say it?— transcendent. Civilization and its attendant virtues of freedom and primacy depend on the accessibility of millions of megabytes of data; no matter that the data has lost its meaning by virtue of loss of its human context . . . the white world has a different set of values from the Indigenous world, one which requires learning all and telling all in the interests of knowledge, objectivity, and freedom. This ethos and its obverse—a nearly neurotic distress in the presence of secrets and mystery—underlie much of modern American culture (p. 59) As social science researchers, there are stories that are entrusted to us, stories that are told to us because research is a human activity, and we make meaningful relationships with participants in our work. At times we come to individuals and communities with promises of proper procedure and confidentiality-anonymity in hand, and are told, “Oh, we’re not worried about that; we trust you!” Or, “You don’t need to tell us all that; we know you will do the right thing by us.” Doing social science research is intimate work, worked that is strained by a tension between informants’ expectations that something useful or helpful will come from the divulging of (deep) secrets, and the academy’s voracious hunger for the secrets. This is not just a question of getting permission to tell a story through a signature on an IRB-approved participant consent form. Permission is an individualizing discourse—it situates collective wisdom as individual property to be signed away. Tissue samples, blood draws, and cheek swabs are not only our own; the DNA contained in them is shared by our relatives, our ancestors, our future generations (most evident when blood samples are misused as bounty for biopiracy.) This is equally true of stories. Furthermore, power is protected by such a collapse of ethics into litigation-proof relationships between individual and research institution. Power, which deserves the most careful scrutiny, will never sign such a permission slip.3 There are also stories that we overhear, because when our research is going well, we are really in peoples’ lives. Though it is tempting, and though it would be easy to do so, these stories are not simply y/ours to take. In our work, we come across stories, vignettes, moments, turns of phrase, pauses, that would humiliate participants to share, or are too sensationalist to publish. Novice researchers in doctoral and master’s programs are often encouraged to do research on what or who is most available to them. People who are underrepresented in the academy by social location—race or ethnicity, indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, or ability—frequently experience a pressure to become the n/ Native informant, and might begin to suspect that some members of the academy perceive them as a route of easy access to communities that have so far largely eluded researchers. Doctoral programs, dissertations, and the master’s thesis process tacitly encourage novice researchers to reach for low-hanging fruit. These are stories and data that require little effort—and what we know from years and years of academic colonialism is that it is easy to do research on people in pain. That kind of voyeurism practically writes itself. “Just get the dissertation or thesis finished,” novice researchers are told. The theorem of lowhanging fruit stands for pretenured faculty too: “Just publish, just produce; research in the way you want to after tenure, later.” This is how the academy reproduces its own irrepressible irresponsibility. Adding to the complexity, many of us also bring to our work in the academy our family and community legacies of having been researched. As the researched, we carry stories from grandmothers’ laps and breaths, from below deck, from on the run, from inside closets, from exclaves. We carry the proof of oppression on our backs, under our fingernails; and we carry the proof of our survivance (Vizenor, 2008) in our photo boxes, our calluses, our wombs, our dreams. These stories, too, are not always ours to give away, though they are sometimes the very us of us. It needs to be said that we are not arguing for silence. Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research. Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as social science research. It is enough that we know them. |
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-The 1AC’s scholarship is founded from a Euro-American standpoint – that kills any possibility for true change |
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-Barker and Murray, English Professors University of Birmingham, University of Leeds 10 |
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-Clare Barker, Stuart Murray, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies Volume 4, Number 3, 2010 “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism,†accessed 7-13-12 BC |
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-The majority of disability scholarship has emerged from traditions that emphasize local aspects of social application. In Europe and the U.K. especially, such work has stressed the processes of law and governance, with a resulting focus on such issues as community-based social services. In the U.S., where a discourse- and humanities-based model has played a greater part in the development of Disability Studies, it has nevertheless been the case that American examples have predominated. In both instances, there has been an understanding that such models may well have application in non-Euro-American contexts (claims for the social model, for example, assert that it can adapt to the local variants of other cultures), but there has been a singular lack of specificity as to the detail of such applications, especially as they might take into account the nature of cultures shaped by colonization and its consequences. It is this question of applicability that concerns us in this special issue. In aiming to develop strategies for postcolonial disability analysis, we aspire toward future scholarship in which the nuanced methods we find in much Euro-American-focused disability criticism are replicated in work on global disability. |