Disability Studies Quarterly
Spring 2004, Volume 24, No. 2
<www.dsq-sds.org>
Copyright 2004 by the Society
for Disability Studies


Othering Ourselves: Reflections on Method, Identity, and Ethics
(Reflections on Unexpected Encounters in Participatory Research)

Virginia Navarro and Jane Zeni
University of Missouri, St. Louis
E-mail: NavarroV@msx.umsl.edu

Abstract: Broun's and Heshusius's paper, Unexpected encounters in participatory research: Meeting the abled? /disabled? self when researching the lives of disabled women, unmasks the intertwining of personal and professional realities while engaging in research. Reflecting on and extending these issues, we critically unpack three central concepts: 1) The evolving choice of appropriate method in interpretive inquiry involves thinking through relational issues and our own theoretical understandings; 2) Attending closely to multi-voiced meanings in dialogue with others expands understandings of our own potential selves, and 3) Research activity inevitably involves ethical conundrums around both the relational and interpretive processes. In this commentary, the authors attempt to broaden the disability focus of Broun's experience by revisiting tensions around method, voice, and identity that apply broadly to everyone who conscientiously engages in ethical situated inquiry. The "I" as well as the "Thou" may be metamorphosed through qualitative inquiry.


Othering Ourselves: Reflections on Method, Identity and Ethics

In an e-mail exchange about Unexpected Encounters, Jane shares her initial response as reader: "What a case study for the evolution of a qualitative inquiry—so often the researcher can't predict where it will go and what the ethical dilemmas may be!" She continues, "I really like the way Leslie [Broun] blends narrative and analysis, telling the story of her research journey while at the same time proposing a typology of research methods and an argument about epistemology."

Virginia replies by e-mail to Jane's musings with her own first cut at explicating Broun's and Heshusius' narrative: "What is powerful in Broun's narrative is the way she reveals her process in the assumed role of 'researcher' struggling with method. How can we not be changed and transformed when we inquire relationally about others with a tool (ourselves) that carries within it a sociocultural history that has shaped a unique way-to-be-in-the-world as a researcher." So begins the first of multiple exchanges in person and electronically as we graft our own understandings onto a reflective written text.

Since our topic is deconstructing issues of identity and qualitative research, we need to introduce ourselves in relation to that topic. Jane, a full professor and editor of a recent book on ethics in doing qualitative research (Zeni, 2001) has a joint appointment in English and education while Virginia, an assistant professor with strong theoretical ties to sociocultural theory, resides in a division of educational psychology. Both of us teach graduate courses in qualitative methods. We also share a background of teaching high school English and of studying qualitative research with long-time mentor Louis M. Smith, author of the autobiography chapter in the 1994 Handbook of Qualitative Research and the recently honored classic Complexities of an Urban Classroom (1968). We believe in mining experience for meaning and participate in an Action Research Collaborative (ARC) with other qualitative researchers.

Although we are European American females who are outsiders to the discourse of disability, each of us has personal and academic ties to the concept of the "other" in conversations about gender, race, and class. Our writing, teaching, and living are reflective as we work to expand understandings of self and other. This co-authored piece will use "we" whenever our experiences or interpretations converge, and use first names when either of us wishes to speak as an individual.

Encountering Unexpected Encounters

Reflective accounts of research are important because they remind readers that scholars are always products of their culture and history, that observations are always limited and partial, that interpretations are complex and contradictory, and that all accounts of research are open to revision and reinterpretation.

         Kirsch, 1999, 82

In our reading of Unexpected Encounters, we first address issues of method in interpretive inquiry. Appropriately aligning research question to research method requires knowledge of the tools of inquiry, clarity in our thinking, some tacit or acquired knowledge of our focus, and finally, self-knowledge. As Broun suggests, "(T)he choice of methodology directly influenced my perception and the attitude toward both my research participants and myself" ( 4). Research issues of identifying questions and choosing appropriate methods are intertwined concretely with issues of identity and voice. We also wish to problematize the linear organization presented in her chart (6) in order to suggest more dynamic relationships among the qualitative methods she discusses. Our analysis will focus on Broun's part of the text; the commentary by Heshusius at the end of the article offers an alternative interpretation, yet seems to remain a gloss of Broun's core revelations.

In the second part of this paper, we hope to elaborate on the issues of identity crisis and reintegration. Too often we leave our own Goffman-type "masks" firmly in place in our role as researcher while being quite willing to cleverly probe behind the masks of those we study. Leslie Broun courageously invites us behind her mask to view the disintegration of her constructed "beautiful and non-disabled" self as she crosses the line and becomes another subject of her own objective gaze. We feel that undergoing such a process of Othering Ourselves invites serious reflection on the goals, process, and tools of research inquiry. The human psychological need to protect a reflected "I" from a culturally named "othered" self may be universal. Do we warn those studying research methods that being present authentically to those who people our projects may well result in emancipating our own self-view? Does recognizing the extent that our research is peopled with an interpretive "I" invalidate the whole enterprise of doing research on others? We hope to untangle such dilemmas raised in Unexpected Encounters.

The final section analyzes ethical dilemmas in doing qualitative research through the prism of outsider/insider issues. Broun's identification as a person with disabilities helps her communicate with the people in her study but also causes the "research findings" to reshape her own self-image in a way she was not expecting. Recent conversations in Virginia's qualitative research class about issues of "access" focused on an ethnography of an African American beauty shop done by a black woman. Some students strenuously argued that a white woman could not understand this scene appropriately, would miss many of the code slang words bantered about, and would stay an outsider. Others argue that "insider" perspectives should not limit the nature and scope of inquiry and that "outsider" views add new perspectives and interpretations that also can be valid. What Unexpected Encounters helps clarify is the risk to self-view when we open our consciousness to others, what Bakhtin (1986) calls "live entering." As an intrinsically moral activity, engaging in social science research organizes, names, and explains the experience of other through the consciousness of self; the effect is additive, yet this synthesized new knowledge can be either constructive or destructive to actual lived lives.

Meeting ourselves in our choice of method

Do these experiences ring true with your experiences? Are these central concerns that resonate with broad human goals and desires? Are you concerned, not just with yourself and your own well being and growth, but with humanity as a whole? Have you changed for the better or worse, and in your change, have you shown a path for others to follow or avoid?

Schank, 2002, 191

Broun describes the array of research methods she considered in her quest for an appropriate methodology for her project. She offers an intriguing chart that begins with the "traditional qualitative methods" of her academic training and ends with "feminist oral history," the method she eventually uses in her thesis. Her chart of this methodological journey, replicated below, suggests a linear sequence that, in our reading, distorts a more heuristic relationship among the methods she discusses in Unexpected Encounters.

_____________________________________________________________________

Figure 1. Methodological journey from Unexpected Encounters

(Broun and Heshusius, 4)

Qualitative

Feminist Values

Participatory

Emancipatory

Feminist Oral History

Broun first explores traditional qualitative methodology, but finds that the relationship between "researcher" and "participant" is too dichotomized. She doubts that traditional qualitative research will capture the complex reciprocal interplay she envisions between herself, as co-disabled object and observer, and the group members in her study. Broun's critique is well founded if we entertain a more positivistic view of qualitative methodologies. For example, Miles and Huberman (1984) say this about the dangers of "research effects":

". . . [W]e have two possible sources of bias here: (a) the effects of the researcher on the site and (b) the effects of the site on the researcher. . . . The first kind of bias (bias a) [poses less risk] because the field researcher typically spends enough time on the site to become part of the local landscape. This, of course, increases the danger of the second kind of bias (bias b): Being co-opted, going native. . . ."

It is probably true that, fundamentally, field research is an act of betrayal, no matter how well intentioned or well integrated the researcher. One makes public the private and leaves the locals to take the consequences. (232-3)

This view appears to us, however, to limit a broader conceptual umbrella of qualitative methods -- including many that overtly support the public location of a self as integral to the research method. Eisner (1998) elaborates this point by drawing on Dewey's notion of transactive to avoid creating a false dichotomy between objective and subjective. Broun's experience of locating her disability-as-identity-in-solidarity with her gaze on "others" might be predicted by Eisner's notion of transaction between objective and subjective states of being: "Since what we can know about the world is always a result of inquiry, it is mediated by mind" (Eisner, 1998, 52). The concept "transactive" implies a bi-directional modality between speaker and addressee, between two sets of consciousness. This relationship is artificially precipitated initially through a cognitive inquiry process but becomes dynamically transactive in action.

Philosophy of language writers continually remind us of the primacy of audience in human utterance:

"Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. .... As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee...I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong." (Volosinov, 1929/1986, 86)

In this case, whatever Broun names other, she inevitably will be naming self as well. So she resists analysis of her data realizing that by listening to the voices of these others, she will hear a multi-voiced description of her own experience as disabled-woman. We would place Broun's transactive experience with her entwined roles as researcher and researched, addresser and addressee, under the umbrella of what she calls traditional qualitative methods. To us, the category of "qualitative" is broad and inclusive, a linguistic concept embracing varied methodologies that encompass multi-voiced and/or emancipatory realities. As Broun refines her choice of method to fit her question and sense of self, she heuristically loops back through an essentially qualitative frame of reference.

The second methodology Broun considers is labeled feminist values. Her summary statement, "This feminist stance became crucial to the development of the research relationship" (5) suggests that she adheres to this fundamental perspective throughout the project although she later refines a subordinate category identified as feminist oral history. For Broun this new perspective allows her to provide "a respectful and appropriate approach by which these stories could be shared" (10). Feminist issues of power and voice resonate with Broun's goal of portraying courage and creativity in a group of women with a categorical label of disabled but who live beyond the labels. She sees herself as a confederate of this group, a status that leads to expectations of equality in voice and shared meanings.

Broun defines participatory, the third method considered according to Figure 1, as "signaling the intimate and intricate levels at which the self (however unaware one may be of this) is involved in the other-self construction, even when we tell ourselves that we are 'finding findings'" (1-2). This research stance is not elaborated here, but seems to have roots in an action research philosophy of relationship. As Jane reads the essay, participatory is later identified with a collaborative methodology that "allows a respectful researcher/ participant relationship while not diminishing . . . the voices of the participants" (9). We see this affirmation, which Broun's text places after her rejection of research principles based on "emancipation" or "empowerment," as the turning point in her methodological journey.

Emancipation: Good for whom?

Broun has clearly struggled with the notion of emancipatory research, devoting several pages to an analysis of its dangers as well as its appeal (5-9). Thinking about voice and power first leads her to reconsider her goals for this group of women that now includes herself: "I felt that this research procedure would, indeed, enlighten and empower my participants and give them (and me) greater insight into our situations" (6). Through her reading of Lather, Broun initially sees her own research as developing a stronger voice for women considered disabled. What she discovers in her dual role, however, is a more pernicious version of arrogant othering by an all-knowing researcher: "You need to be empowered, you need to be transformed, you need to be emancipated from the fetters of your dispossession -- and I can help you" (8). She responds with an ethical question: "What privileged status do I have as researcher to determine who deserves/ needs emancipation through my efforts?" (9). We think this self-questioning is healthy for any researcher who strives to become an instrument of empowerment for others. We would add another question: "How am I prepared to allow myself to be emancipated among the others?" For some emancipatory activity connotes research "with" not "to" subjects.

Broun's chart concludes, then, with a method she perceives to be more dialogic: feminist oral history. For the authors of Unexpected Encounters, this method highlights respect for others' voices as researcher becomes translator rather than emancipatory cheerleader. As a reader, Virginia was struck by the comments on how feminist oral history felt right. In a relaxed story-sharing context, the women begin to discuss issues of their disability experience, often for the first time: "Rather than disclosure, there was an 'unfolding' as we each revealed our histories" (11). Pursuing that "right fit" remains a personal journey for each person.

In search of a method: Self and other

We like the way Broun depicts her journey of exploration as a typology of qualitative methods (Fig. 1). Her text, however, suggests a process that is more heuristic than linear, more a spiral "unfolding" than a sequence of rejection. We believe that this process has implications for the development of other new qualitative researchers. Virginia offers a possible reconfiguration in Figure 2 below:


Figure 2. Broun's methodological journey, re-seen by Navarro and Zeni

Figure 2. Broun's methodological journey, re-seen by Navarro and Zeni

The superordinate category of qualitative methods, traditional or otherwise, represents a macro concept that embraces multiple paradigms. Feminist oral history, instead of being the last in a linear sequence of methods, to us is an application of feminist values in a specific activity. Participatory (which we identify with collaborative) describes Broun's practice of feminist values and loops through all the categories. Emancipatory research has links to qualitative and feminist issues but is framed here as being outside of authentic participatory and feminist principles of inquiry in Broun's analysis. [The above paragraph describes the graphic.]

Mapping a scheme to reflect one's methodological journey seems a worthwhile effort if we take seriously the idea of researcher as tool. Understanding the appropriate relationships among self, subject, setting, and research question will shape the quality of the final text in significant ways.

For Broun, it seems that the tension underlying that journey is her dual role as participant/observer. As researcher, she actively others herself, and what her study reveals threatens her own positive self-image and her willingness to engage with her data. As participant, she embarks on a classic spiritual journey that provokes re-examination of the self and confrontation with some essential brokenness; multiple facets of "I" are discovered and eventually reintegrated into a more holistic self-view. Brokenness can be emotional or spiritual as well as physical. Taking on the role of inquirer invites transformational knowing, both for self and other. Broun concludes, "(T)he participants ended up empowering me by sharing their experiences and insights into their lives" (9). Research means learning and authentic learning transforms us in transactive ways.

Encounter with self

Genuine subjectivity can only be dynamically understood, as the swinging of the I in its lonely truth. . . . In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures. . . . The person becomes conscious of himself as sharing in being, as co-existing, and thus as being.

Buber, 1958, 63

As an insider to disability, Broun becomes co-participant with an emic perspective, but as research author she also exercises an etic perspective. Hovering between consciousness of a "we" and a "they," the author faces an existential moment that recognizes the power of the connections between the "I" and the "Thou."

Broun's story of encountering herself as other in the section "Meeting the Self" represents a repositioning of an I as inclusive of many potential selves. Although Broun's initial version of self highlighted "beauty" and backgrounded "limp," she powerfully reflects on her thwarted plan to resist the "shift" to a limping self until later in life: "(I)n the video in my mind, I would walk with a limp and I couldn't get back my limpless self" ( 15). Aspects of self that had gone underground are confronted, but reluctantly, within a resistant experience of praxis.

Gesa Kirsch (1999) admonishes the researcher to "get beyond facile statements about our identity and begin the admittedly difficult but important analytical work of assessing precisely how these personal factors affect our work, how they enable certain perspectives and blind us to others" (80). Kirsch argues that feminists need to move beyond a perfunctory list of gender, race, and class descriptors to take the risk of deeper personal self-revelation. We applaud Broun's and Heshusius' efforts to engage in this task. We would argue, however, that all research involves issues of enmeshing personal, theoretical, and methodological boundaries to some degree. In coming to know oneself, one is capable of opening to others.

Recently Virginia completed a case study with Scot Danforth with the family of a young man diagnosed in 6th grade as having ADHD. His decision to resist this imposed identity and the mother's strong advocacy for her son resonated deeply with Virginia's experience with her son, also a bright sociable athlete who struggled with aspects of formal schooling. We are pulled in many ways to experience empathy in our research as glimmerings of our own autobiographical stories are woven into our questions and understandings. A student in Virginia's class was appalled at the idea that politicians or researchers might let personal experience shape policy decisions or research agendas; we wonder if it is possible to really bracket our situated self-knowledge from the research process.

What Broun candidly realizes in her role as insider/outsider is that probing for richer data from the outside may look like voyeurism from the inside. Her own defense against turning a Foucaultian "gaze" upon herself is to avoid asking anyone the hard questions about the experience of disability. Aware of the pain involved in the disability experience, she protects both herself and her subjects from dredging up certain memories. Her focus on "strength, independence, and achievements" (18) reframes memory selectively to highlight the overwhelming human normalcy in the day-to-day lives of these women. By doing this, Virginia asks, does she risk losing the collaborative role she has carefully chosen for herself, by adopting yet another privileged researcher stance? Celebrating positive life events is a worthy project; silencing voices by incorporating their stories into our own worldview is a problem. Jane sees this decision not as silencing, but rather as respect. People with disabilities, like people of color, often experience the voyeurism of the "unmarked" majority asking intimate questions that they, themselves would not welcome. Perhaps Broun avoids the questions because she has at last owned the disabled self she had othered: "I am forever 'other,' along with my participants and all people with visible physical disabilities" (14).

However we interpret Broun's story, the work of constructing a self is ongoing and difficult. Qualitative research acknowledges the complex but inevitable transactive relationship between viewer and viewed. Issues of multi-voiced text become even more layered as we Other ourselves in order to deconstruct the layered meanings within our own conscious experience of observing others and ourselves.

For Jane, the "layered meanings" recall her experience as consultant to a multi-year action research team of secondary teachers who were changing their own practice in an effort to stop the chronic underachievement of African American students. Since the dozen teachers on the team included just one African American, her colleagues spoke often about their Whiteness and their commitment to broadening their cultural boundaries. It was not until a research meeting two years later, however, when someone remarked that most of the underachieving students they were discussing seemed to be male, that the teachers "saw" the next layer: they were all female! Only then could they explore gender as an issue in their research and in their ability to connect with Black male students. Later, the team would entitle their book, Mirror images: Teaching writing in black and white (Krater, Zeni, and Cason, 1994).

As McCarthy and Fishman (1996) comment: "(W)e believe successful studies are measured not by how closely they mirror a single reality, but by how profoundly they affect the participants. . . a successful naturalistic study helps both informants and researchers become more self-conscious about their assumptions and constructions of the world" ( 156).

Based on the narrative in Unexpected Encounters, we can assume that the effect on the researcher was profound. Six years after completing her thesis, Broun is finally able to reflect and write on the meanings and identity work provoked by doing this research. For us, Broun's words still echo a sense of loss for an earlier, less complicated but more beautiful self-view – perhaps both as a person and as a researcher.

Ethical Issues in Locating Oneself as Researcher

Neither the insider nor the outsider is granted immaculate perception.

Erickson, foreword to Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993, ix

Whatever a researcher brings to an inquiry -- gender, race, class, disabilities, institutional roles -- will leave some mark on the researcher's perception. As qualitative researchers, we believe that we have an ethical responsibility to reflect on our own cultural baggage and to reject the illusion of "cultural invisibility" -- even in academic writing (Zeni and Prophete, 2001). Like Heshusius (24), we have seen that even today most qualitative researchers "keep the separation between the self and other intact," with the implication that the self, the researcher, is both objective and superior.

Leslie Broun's self-analysis seems to us an important contribution to the genre of "author-saturated" research texts (Geertz, 97). Writing such a text presents rhetorical as well as ethical challenges: How does the author do justice to the "other" while also representing his or her own responses, while also displaying his or her own "research tools"? For example, Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994) skillfully interweaves memories of herself as an African American schoolgirl with material from her interviews with teachers and observations of their classes. Writing such a text is an even greater challenge with two or more authors. Unfortunately, Broun and Heshusius did not share with their readers what must have been many dialogues on the issues of self and other, and we learn nothing of the cultural baggage that the faculty advisor brought to their paper.

This anomaly reminds Jane of her work with Mirror images (1994). Throughout this collaborative action research project, each teacher had connected with the inquiry personally in many ways. For Jane, the mother of two male children of color (both high school students at the time), the link was close and urgent. She and her co-authors submitted to the publisher a 500-page draft, filled with rich vignettes of students and teachers and culturally responsive curriculum. As she explains,

We were shocked and quite embarrassed when the editor responded that we had said almost nothing about ourselves and the journey that had brought us to this research team. So each of us decided to write a personal culture narrative (mine focused on my parenting experiences) which we set between the more expository chapters in the book. Sharing these stories led to laughter, tears, and new insights among colleagues who had worked together closely for years.

The risk in such self-revelation is that what was once private is now open to the public. "Who gets to tell the story?" asks Heshusius (24). Similarly, in a suburban St. Louis school district, teachers and administrators asked "Who owns the story?" as they framed a code of ethics for research in their schools (Clayton Research Review Team, 2001). Along with the ethical principle of "respect" discussed earlier, we would propose an ongoing process of consent: Other participants and collaborators should be consulted whenever a story will be shared with a wider audience. Jane regularly approaches her own university practice as an action researcher, and she regularly gathers data from and with her preservice teachers and colleagues in English Education. Part of her consent process is sharing drafts of her conference papers with her students and asking for their feedback. Through such consultation, we believe a research participant can come to trust that information will not be presented in an unacceptable context or to an unsafe audience.

We agree with Broun and Heshusius that qualitative research is a journey, and that one of the researcher's tasks is to explore various research methods, interpretive frames, and presentation genres. For this reason, it seems dubiously ethical to approach a participant with a research plan, obtain consent, do the study, and then disappear. Inevitably, the research journey will have led in directions that could not fully be predicted at the start, and to insights that should be shared with participants before we go our separate ways.

Perhaps if we view the research journey as one that entails a series of negotiated encounters between the researcher and the "others," we can problematize the notion of "emancipatory research" in a more positive way than Broun suggests. Through these encounters, through these dialogues, both the researcher and the researched will be changed. Kirsch, for example, used "a cycle of collaboration that allowed both researcher and participants to shape the interpretation of interviews" ( 18). When such a process is successful, each will be an active, inquiring self and each will be an "other," an object of study. Such a process need not involve an arrogant researcher who brings the tools of emancipation to the unenlightened "other." Instead, we might set as our goal an emancipatory, collaborative approach to qualitative research -- one rooted in feminist values -- in which all participants gain from the experience.

Is it possible to acquire and use tools of inquiry without a corresponding change in our own self-view? Invariably we encounter an irreducible tension between our present world view and the world view and perspectives of other. The ways we appropriate and reaccentuate these voices of other into our own discourse are linked in complex ways to our choice of method. Othering Ourselves acknowledges the central role of the relational patterns we weave as a reflection of our understanding and choice of method. Our own stories are integral to the questions we ask, the method we use, and the stories we can tell. Methods are tools that have embedded within them their own evolutionary history; they are the filters that distill our thinking. As Broun's thoughtful article illuminates, the choice of method from possible qualitative tools may be significant in unexpected ways. We would add, choose wisely and ethically by reading broadly in a variety of research genres.

What all of us as researchers bring to our inquiries is ourselves. Our experiences, our cultural lenses, interact with a range of tools, a range of research methods -- and in the process, we are changed. It is important for the beginning qualitative researcher to know and to try out an array of methods, to make his or her own methodological journey, in order to discover the best fit of question, method, and the inquiring self.

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