Community Activism, and Reflexive Scholarship

There were a couple of points in the articles for this week that stood out to me. In the Khan article (Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age), right in the beginning she identifies a "conundrum for women who critique the sexism in their communities -- they are silenced by the fear of being accused of betrayal by community members," and so they seek sexism elsewhere, often in the Third World. This also applies to others who feel that they must fight the fight elsewhere, often abroad. For me, this is a fresh way of viewing this movement. I had always thought that is was a lack of introspection and a feeling of superiority that drove us abroad to fight for social justice. It can be more challenging to fight injustice in our own communities, and even less rewarding, since we know what the real results are. But that is just the point. We know better than anyone what sort of solutions will work, and what are the things that really need to changed. It is hard to know the true depth of a problem, and try to fix it, rather than superficially know a problem and think that you fixed it. I appreciate Khan's perspective on this issue.

In the rather lengthy and wordy Kesby article (Retheorizing Empowerment-through-Participation as a Performance in Space: Beyond Tyranny to Transformation), I found his definitions of power really intriguing. It really falls right into the feminist methodologies. It reminds me of the idea of contextualizing subjects and topics, and now contextualizing power. His whole focus on how people are constantly performing really made me think of my research project for my BA in Sociology. It was all about Symbolic Interactionism and Impression Management, and the more I thought about my methodology and my actual paper, I started to realize the subtle but unmistakable Guerilla 'Gogy that my professor had been enacting! First off, he made us write a "Person-Problem Statement" which is basically how you are connected to this research as a person. Wait! Reflexivity, woah. Second, he suggested I try an experiment methodology, which is rather nontraditional of sociology. I had made these heinous (well at least I subjectively tried) shoes, and asked people to wear them around for a day then tell me about their experience. They wrote about how they did not think they would be self-conscious, but how slowly they realized how they were becoming more paranoid and trying to hide the shoes. To me, this is on the way to being a participatory project, since my subjects were in on the basic tenets of my project and themselves went through this process that was my research -- trying to convince the reader that shoes matter! While it was far from perfect (hey, it was only my second year), thinking about it now, I am amazed at what happened. Also, reading my person-problem statement and thinking about that whole process makes me amazed at that tricky professor of mine.

A picture of the Ug(ly) Shoes