A proposal for a collaborative ‘journal’ on the messy,inter-subjective and critically evidential in social and community work research

Introduction

A strength of social work research is that it is situated in people’s lives. As a practice discipline, social work is highly conducive to applied social research (Everitt et al., 1992; Orme and Shemmings, 2010). In other words, the research has a practical purpose – to change how we do things or to inform a project. Its very credibility lies in its ability to be relevant and instrumental to the lives of those who participate. Marsh and Fisher (2008) say that if ‘we persist in dividing research from those it’s supposed to benefit, then of course it will not be evidence-based’ (p. 974). And ‘evidence-based’ may best result from non-conventional methods and unpredictable outcomes.

I am proposing a ‘journal’, an on-going affair, that is committed to the creation of knowledge as specific to context, those who participate, and their ways of finding answers. In fact, the process of finding out is as important as the results. Our research can be the learning experience that comes from interacting across cultures, disciplines, class, race and gender – and what takes place at the boundaries of inclusion.

It can be a dialogic journal through which we hear one another and honour each other’s knowings and ways of knowing.

It is less about format and more about finding the means to share knowledge that benefits a broader perspective on humanity and change efforts on a planet increasingly controlled by the DSM-5. ¹ It is about holding onto personhood, agency and collective knowings.

‘Insider’ and ‘outsider’

Integral to the process of ‘doing research’ is what happens between us when research funding and parameters are decided by outside interests. The ‘key actors’ of a research proposal or project plan are very often ‘remote’ yet have major influence through globalised networks of communication, information-sharing and wealth (Long, 2001: 113).

Villarreal (1992) speaks of the external ‘planner’ coming in with their plan and not finding the ‘target group’ available.

Marshall (2002) speaks of ‘positionality’ as a ‘perpetual source of questioning and self-revelation’. It’s the meeting of ‘life worlds’ in a ‘spatial’ context that is imbued with subjectivities, misinterpretation and the possibility of things going wrong.

Long’s (1992, 2001) actor-oriented perspective in development sociology talks of ‘interface’ situations – the spaces where insiders and outsiders make contact. People and groups ‘construct boundaries around themselves’, both differentiating themselves from others and also protecting themselves from public scrutiny and intrusion (66). It can be a highly volatile location.

We present as if research runs smoothly when it doesn’t. Ellingson and Ellis (2008) in terms of ethnography write that ‘many will dismiss out of hand work that admits to a messy process’ – but it is inaccurate to present ethnographic research as progressing smoothly, and the glitches along the way, the insecurities and self-doubt, help other researchers (p. 453). Ramaswamy (2004 [1974]) reflects on anthropological research on a Navaho reservation in the United States, as a doctoral student from India. He found himself construed as a spy while giving his living allowance away.

England (2002) tells of trying to arrange interviews with Canadian female bank managers, an ‘elite’ group of women, who didn’t have a lot of time or anything they wanted to say. In this vein, who are the elite who decide public policy? Georgina Kaufmann (1997) gives a good example of ‘positionings’ and the ‘politics of location’ in her interviews with well-off development consultants in the United Kingdom and female street workers in Brazil. The former needed complete assurance of anonymity, kept her to the clock and wanted to know how the information would be used. The women on the streets of Brazil wanted their names known, wanted the world to know their situation and would talk for as long as she needed. She asks, can these two groups really hear one another?

In the incredible mix of human lives and circumstances we have to draw on, why isn’t social work speaking to what really happens as to challenge uniformity and standardised procedures. Western feminism, for example, has been challenged to see beyond its limited and privileged understanding of women who experience ‘gender’ differently, given the other stresses of their everyday lives (Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997; Nnaemeka, 2005). Marshall (2002) attests to having detrimentally crossed personal boundaries when her research took her into doing social work and her female informants became silent.

Social work research accounts omit the increased understanding of self and others that is created in the inter-subjective, uncertain, dialogic and controversial when most of what we do and say concerns the intimacies of lives and life-worlds! It is also about how decisions get made throughout the research process in response to what is allowed and what is not.

Speaking to increased inequalities

At the same time, social work and community development are in a position to reveal the fall-out of corporatisation of land, resources, services and food while professionals compete for stalls in the marketplace. We can legitimately expose the effects of unfettered capitalism while highlighting the intelligence of local ‘sense-making’, tactics and analysis (Reason and Bradbury, 2001).

Saskia Sassen (2015 [1996]) – in Losing Control? – speaks of the globalised ‘dispersal of economic control’ as incorporating ‘mixes of elites, technical capabilities, global networks’. It is not ‘planned’, while at the same time being concentrated and single-minded. It is less about controlling vast territories than it is about ‘extracting what is profitable’. More and more people are being impoverished within nation-states by external corporate interests. Countries are given international aid to improve conditions for foreign investment amounting to external control over the domestic economy (White, 2004). Sassen speaks of an ‘economic cleansing’ that makes statistically invisible those subsequently dislocated – the small local business owners, the workers who depended on the small local business owners, the subsequent homeless, unemployed, suicidal (p. xv). ‘These trends’, Sassen writes, ‘are defining the space of the economy. They are shrinking it and in the process expelling a good share of the unemployed and impoverished middle class from standard measures …’ (p. xvii) (while the poor and low income cease to exist; Mendoza Rangel, 2005). The magic is that no one owns it.

Knowledge in urgent times

Social work is a practice discipline – our forté is what we witness/learn about human life, human communities as they are lived (Bywaters, 2008). We can have a pulse on what is happening – and in such a wide variety of locations and personalities. We have a lot of knowledge, which pooled, can be a force to be reckoned with given the ascendancy of international economic policy as social policy (Sassen, 2015 [1996]).

I am suggesting a journal that is intent on the urgency of human life and the power of producing knowledge that can be used effectively (i.e. participatory research, action research, collaborative research, feminist action research, critical constructionism, new paradigm research, critical ethnography and critical indigenous). A journal that is less concerned with format – in terms of conventional presentation – and more concerned that our research speaks to context, lives and doing. Verification happens in its educative, catalytic and tactical potential as supported through a constructivist and participatory approach (Bryman, 2001; Lincoln, 2001). ‘Evidence’ becomes based on how it has informed and benefited local effort. It can include poetry, story-telling and popular theatre (Foster, 2007)

Contextual authenticity

Another anticipation in steering away from the sanitised and correct is to allow for a contextualised account that is also honest – so we can accurately say ‘this really did happen’. This is about a commitment to authenticity and trustworthiness that allows us to accurately name reality in order to change it (Maguire, 1987), neither camouflaging nor compartmentalising the confusion, chaos, uncertainty, local and indigenous knowings and actions – in the global economy.