Seriously, I'm just going to post my Exemplar Paper- bwa ha?
Chang’s Cautionary Tale: An Argument for Person-Based Collaboration
To be perfectly honest, the idea of collaborating in any non-text-based manner has become somewhat unsettling lately. I am constantly reminded of an international human rights course that I took as an undergraduate, in which we critiqued groups as seemingly unproblematic as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders in English), the Peace Corps, and UNICEF. In his book East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia, David A. Bell creates a fictional dialogue between Sam Demo (Democracy), the “East Asia program officer for U.S.-based National Endowment for Human Rights and Democracy (NEHRD)” and Joseph Lo (Local knowledge), head of the “Hong Kong-based East Asia Institute for Economic and Political Risk Analysis… known locally as a well-connected human rights activist” (23). In this conversation, Lo carefully critiques Demo and his colleagues’ work in East Asia for their assumptions that East Asian values were different than those in the U.S (cultural relativism). Instead, Lo argues that, while values are universal similar, they are differently prioritized in different cultures (moral universalism). For example, when Senator Harkin introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act of 1992, which would make it illegal for any goods produced by underage youth to be brought into the U.S. from other countries, nearly 50,000 children in the Bangladesh garment industry lost their jobs (Bellamy 60). Without any legal ability to work and still in dire need of income, many of these children instead turned to work such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution,” which are far "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production" (Bellamy 60) and other occupations they had formerly employed. According to Bell, among others, the Global North tends to prioritize civil liberties (freedom of speech, an end of child labor, equality, etc.), while the Global South tends to prioritize survival (clean water, disease prevention, shelter, etc.). I will be speaking to this idea throughout this essay, the idea that our partners in collaboration may differently prioritize even commonly held values. While our capstone collaborators and we may both/all desire to empower the groups and peoples with whom we study, all graduate students, as students working toward a thesis or capstone, have the additional priority of advancing our own academic careers.
Firstly, I assume the term “exemplar” in its capacity as a fancy word for “model” or “example,” rather than meaning an ideal or perfect example. It would be impossible to find any research with which I am perfectly satisfied, and I think that one of the things that drives me as a researcher is the desire to be as close to that imagined exemplary piece as possible. The purposes of this brief study are to find a way to collaborate in a manner that is least problematic, not completely unproblematic. I will address this issue further in the conclusion.
While my proposed research is in an admittedly constant state of flux, I will briefly outline my (most) current ideas for collaboration in order to demonstrate how it relates to the exemplars discussed. These exemplars will include Carol Rambo’s “Multiple Reflections of Child Sex Abuse: An Argument for a Layered Account,” Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Writers’ Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Although I am now certain that I would like to research issues surrounding “non-normative physicalities,” my working PC term for physically disabled conditions, specifically with regard to chronic (physical) pain sufferers, I more or less equally interested and concerned about the research methods employed in these three pieces. Each of these methods prescribes a different level of collaboration with “research subjects” and other groups/people. Richa Nagar worked with the Sangtin Writers, a group of Indian women working in NGOs, Iris Chang primarily worked with an archive of oral histories, photographs, and newspaper articles, and Carol Rambo worked with her own memories as related to existing texts on child sexual assault in a postmodern autoethnographic manner. While these women work with communities in different ways that may be judged by critiquing the resulting texts, I will also look at the locations of these researchers within their fields, and how they and others have reflected on their own work on later dates.
Having had the opportunity to attend a number of talks with Carol Rambo earlier this year, I am offered a unique perspective on her “Multiple Reflections of Child Sex Abuse” and layered account method in general. In the paper itself, Rambo considers the collaborative tools utilized, and who her collaborative partners are: “When I write about my social world, I codify myself on paper… I write myself, I edit myself, interacting with the self I wrote by objectifying it, judging it, and rewriting it in response. Each time I write and reflect, I view myself as an object while simultaneously being an active subject (Bulmer 1969; Mead 1962). The writing subject interacts with the written object” (399). In this manner, Rambo suggests that she is collaborating with the multiple selves within her self. Early in the piece, she clarifies that she is utilizing a definitively “postmodern ethnographic reporting technique” (396), and later recognizes that this ethnographic method is the only one really available for studying such a difficult subject, child sexual abuse, through participant observation (421). Similarly, I find that an autoethnographic approach is the only method that truly allows one to consider the experiences of continuous bodily pain. While the existence of consistent physical suffering, such as the large number of cases of fibromyalgia (an estimated 3-6% of the world’s population according to the U.S.-based National Fibromyalgia Association), is becoming more and better understood, it is impossible to see the effects of these conditions without being someone with one of these conditions. Most chronic pain maladies simply cannot be explained by science, and anyone interviewed regarding their conditions are, of necessity, in a state of pain. To what extent can a person with physical pain voice their bodily experiences, and should they, or rather we, be burdened with an intrusive interview by a researcher who is to some extent using us to further their own academic careers? Yet, even from an autoethnographic perspective, to what extent can we say that a child abuse sufferer and research subject has been burdened. Has Rambo has burdened herself in the same ways that other researchers have burdened “non-self” subjects? Furthermore, at our campus events, Rambo commented many times on her non-tenured status at the University of Memphis, and mentioned that her choice to use the layered account as a method may be at least partially to blame.
In their piece on “Compulsory Feral-ization,” Snyder and Mitchell address some of these issues and offer a perspective that almost wholly opposes my own. This text considers the history of research with disabled people, arguing that there is a level of “compulsory feral-ization,” referring to both the forced sterilization of people with disabilities and the perception of such people as less than human. One example utilized throughout the text is the story of the “feral child” called Victor, a young man with severe mental disabilities who, as a result, was subjected to terrible "treatments," including being hung upside down from a window (190). In this piece, Mitchell and Snyder argue for a text-based only approach to disability studies, explaining that we are too ingrained in the framework that oppresses disabled people to understand when we oppress them through our research. Disabled populations have already been terribly abused by the “academy” over the years, and by studying them in a non-text-based method, “we are running the risk of reproducing aspects of an oppressive structure” (201). Yet Snyder and Mitchell do not address “people-based research practices” (199) that are autoethnographic in nature. This issue was addressed in a recent Blackboard post (speaking to me) by one of my classmates:
Well on the one hand, you and I are the "Spivak and Chakrabarty" of the class on that one-- only you and I really "get" what it is like to experience pain 24/7. Even people who live with someone with chronic pain doesn't get it-- she "gets" what it is like to LIVE with someone with chronic pain. That is different. On the other hand, if we just throw up our hands and say well we'll never get it so let's not try-- all is lost. People who honestly WANT to "feel our pain" (with all due respect to Bill Clinton) are at least empathetic and I can at least talk to them and say things like "don't act like you feel sorry for me because I really hate that," whereas if we just give up even trying to communicate then we're complicit in building that wall (Brown).
This problems with regard to representing, and possibly misrepresenting, a community within which one collaborates is well explained through a conversation with my next exemplar, Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Writers’ Playing with Fire.
Nagar’s introduction to this work explains the method utilized by all nine of the co-authors in creating Playing with Fire, which originally appeared in Hindi under the title Sangtin Yatra. While it is not clear what initially brought these women together, Nagar clearly states that the women began to work toward a common purpose to raise the issues discussed within women’s empowerment NGO’s in India, and all had an active role in this collaborative piece. The book itself is adapted from many of the Sangtin women’s autobiographical diary pieces, edited by Nagar at the request of the other group members, and translated into English for this Playing with Fire edition. Nagar explains the work that went into making sure that every participant was satisfied with the final text: “My energies were focused on writing, sharing, and redrafting every piece of the text until it met with the full satisfaction and approval of the other eight authors. This process gave each member of the collective a sense of ownership of the words and thoughts that were being written discussed, negotiated, revised, and re-revised” (XXXII). It is also significant to note that Nagar’s is the last name listed on the bibliographical page of the book. This process, excluding the final translation into English, took approximately six years (XXX). Yet, after it’s initial publication in Hindi, these women faced a great deal of backlash despite their careful efforts, with the exception of Nagar, who returned to the U.S. after Sangtin Yatra’s publication. While it was recognized beforehand that disseminating the group’s work may result in severe criticism for the authors in their NGO work and volunteer-based organizations, all of the women chose to include their legal names on the document. Nagar writes that none of them expected such backlash; another author, Richa Singh, was relocated in her position within one of the NGO’s discussed and eventually resigned as a result (XLV).
Although this book and its popularity in the U.S. is ostensibly the reason for Nagar’s receipt of tenure, and while it remains unclear whether or not the lives of the other Sangtin women have improved, I argue that this book demonstrates one of the more successful collaboration efforts that I have seen. While Nagar notably does not mention the importance of publications in efforts to further one’s university professor career, the text does imply that she has spoken about this issue with her co-collaborators. She explains that she had hoped that all of the Sangtin women would be directly involved in the book-writing process, but that she was informed that they believed that “their main job was to write and reflect on their lives and work, not to learn how to write a book” (XXXIX) while Nagar’s job was not to learn how to be a women’s rights advocate in India. Although one of Nagar’s main priorities may and seems to have been maintaining a level of equal voice among her collaborators, the other Sangtin women rejected this idea, reprioritizing the project. Nagar’s fluidity and ability to adapt to these women’s needs, demands, wants, and very lives, is motivating for me as a researcher, particularly one who would like to engage in this kind of “collective methodology” (XXVIII).
Furthermore, and referring to my final exemplar, it seems unhealthy for a researcher to sit alone with a series of coffee cups, stacks of books, and messy piles of articles writing out an enormous paper. Iris Chang is a noted journalist who wrote the New York Times bestseller The Rape of Nanking about the most concentrated mass extermination campaign in world history (an estimated 350,000 Chinese civilians were killed in two weeks) (Chang, 6). Her collaborators, in the case of this book, and its unfinished successor on the Bataan Death March, are survivors and the voices of those who did not survive, their stories told through letters, diaries, photographs, and film. In the introduction to The Rape of Nanking, Chang explains that she was drawn to the topic by the “horror” (7) stories told to her by her parents about the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China, in 1937. She was reintroduced to the event in more graphic terms as an adult, and began attending seminars, conferences, museum exhibitions, etc. discussing the gruesome details and viewing full-size photographs of the invasion and how those 350,000 civilians were killed. For the book The Rape of Nanking, Chang further examined photographs, journal entries, letters, films, newspaper articles, oral histories of survivors and soldiers, and other primary sources (9). In the book itself, 24 pages of photographs are included, displaying the various war crimes committed: a line of heads removed from Chinese civilians by sword and forced to posthumously smile for a killing contest, the bodies of women raped to death displayed in pornographic poses, the remains of babies thrown from the walls, etc. Chang chose to work almost entirely with primary materials, collaborating indirectly with the slaughtered, the survivors, and the witnesses. She also worked, to a lesser extent, with human rights groups seeking to make the events of the Japanese invasion of Nanking well-known, learning of a secondary Rape of Nanking that occurred in the “cover-up, the story of how the Japanese, emboldened by the silence of the Chinese and Americans, tried to erase the entire massacre from public consciousness, thereby depriving its victims of their proper place in history” (14).
Chang does not clearly articulate why she chose to use a text-based approach in her research; no interviews from survivors of the Nanking invasion are included in this book, only primary sources from the time of the massacre itself. Perhaps the reason has something to do with her position as a journalist versus a university professor or PhD candidate; while journalists are stereotypically consumed by a search for the truth, qualitative researchers in the academia have difficulty so much as writing “truth” without putting it in quotation marks. This book reads as though written by a historian, and is fueled by an attempt to remain unbiased (13). While this book was hugely successful and also hugely criticized as “Japan bashing” (13), the most important thing to consider when using this work is an exemplar, is the fact that the author took her own life seven years later. Perhaps it had something to do with the final conversation that Chang had with her friend and biographer Paula Kamen, as quoted in Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind: “She talked about her overwhelming fears and anxieties, including being unable to face the magnitude- and the controversial nature- of the stories that she uncovered while researching her book on the Bataan Death March” (xi).
Looking at Chang’s story from a fellow researcher’s perspective, I can’t help but wonder if her collaboration method, working with the remains of people versus people themselves, may have, in some way, contributed to her death. I can imagine her sitting alone with the aforementioned photographs hanging on her walls, oral histories describing the exact details of these deaths sitting on her desk, World War II history books that fail to mention Nanking (12-14) littering her floor. It would be stranger not to sink into a depression under such circumstances. Is it any coincidence that she took her own life after following up an extensive study on a little known massacre with new research on the Bataan Death March?
While I recognize that the wellbeing of my “subjects” must be a great priority for me as a researcher, I find that my first priority must be my own wellbeing. Recognizing that my own pain will be a huge factor in any research in which I hope to engage, I think that it would be much better to work in an at least partially “person-based” research collaboration versus working from a wholly first-person autoethnographic or wholly text-based method. Furthermore, as is well explained by Brown, as a fellow chronic pain sufferer, I am a perfect interview candidate for myself. I would be remiss as a researcher not to include my own experiences as well as those of my aching cohorts. While I will be mindful about potentially misusing my friends, the fellow chronic pain sufferers who I now fully intend to interview, I am not going to work myself into a depression over it. I will try to be as open to change as possible, using Richa Nagar as an example. Furthermore, and most importantly, I will recognize that someone, somewhere is going to find my work offensive, but this is no reason to retreat into a text-based approach. After all, it didn’t save Chang from severe criticism.
Works Cited
Bell, Daniel A. East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Bellamy, Carol. “The State of the World’s Children: 1997.” New York: UNICEF, 1997.
Brown, Deborah. “RE: Used a "free pass" / thoughts on my own disability.” Online posting. Blackboard. 20 Apr. 2010. 24 Apr. 2010
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Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Kamen, Paula. Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind. Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2007.
Nagar, Richa, et. al. Playing with Fire: feminist thought and activism through seven lives in India. Minneapolis, MN: U of MN P, 2006.
“Prevalence.” National Fibromyalgia Association. 2009. 24 Apr. 2010 .
Ronai, Carol Rambo. “Multiple Reflections of Child Sex Abuse: An Argument for a Layered Account.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23.4 (1995): 395- 426.
---. "Sketching with Derrida: an ethnography of a researcher/erotic dancer." Qualitative Inquiry 4.3 (1998): 405-417.
Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. “Conclusion: Compulsory Feral-ization.” Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2006. 185-203.
