Abstract
In this article, I trace the ways in which my doctoral thesis methodology became a “pedagogy of vulnerability.” Using two “stop moments,” I describe the emergent “openings” that not only helped shape and shift the direction of my research, but also allowed me to be shaped by it. In being willing to labor, risk, and learn in and through the methodological choices made and especially with/in/from the borderlands, I demonstrate how one might think, work through, and play with the many possibilities that could interrupt the normative ways of “doing” research.
Keywords
to be queer to be brown, south asian, desi
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is to be mixed up no - nahin, it is to be in a state of mixedness - mishritata. . . . to be mishritata to be at a borderlands is to recognize. know my story and the stories that have made me shaped me come before me sacrificed for me so that I may live this life and to learn these stories if I must. to be mishritata is to cross borders honor mourn survive negotiate collude be complicit be aware resist navigate accommodate move stay still shout scream cry rage. whisper softly. breathe. hum sing. dance sweat. live to heal heal to love thrive. be. it is to occupy a mishrit body.(Field note, January 14, 2017)
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Claiming My Borderland: Mishritata
Mishritata means mixedness in Hindi—a composite, made up of various parts and elements, and for me, is my borderlands positionality. It describes the messiness that emerges from the convergence of quotidian lived experiences of ethnic, racial, gendered, queered, and other cultural identities (Rocha, 2011). Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) introduced the idea of the borderlands in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera, in which she argues for recognition of the borderlands—“where cultures, ideas, norms, selves are remade, reconfigured, where pain mingles with uncertainty, fear, anxiety, creativity and new possibilities” (Ortega, 2016, p. 17). In reading Anzaldúa’s writing, I found myself recognizing a cultural language that metaphorically resonated with my own experiences as a queer, brown, Desi emerging scholar. It helped me understand the many fragmentations of my being. Her ability to write through the simultaneity of pain and possibility has deeply inspired me to think through my research in new ways. This has included returning “home” to the borders—both visible and invisible and exploring the ways in which the telling of my research story may more effectively reflect my de/colonial 3 mishritata journey in diaspora.
According to Anzaldúa (2003), “Nepantleras are the supreme border crossers” (p. 20) that are able to connect and relate between cultures as well as own their various multiple truths of being and becoming. Anzaldúa’s theorization of a “nepantlera” (the embodied experience of negotiating “nepantla” - a Nahuatl word meaning “in-between space”) especially aligns with the ways I understand the experiences of queer Desis/South Asians in my research. Queer Desis/South Asians navigate multiple worlds, where they are often considered marginal to those respective communities. As a result, they build a specific repertoire of tactics and strategies to navigate not only physical spaces but the emotional ones as well. Springgay and Freedman (2008) argue that our bodies have the ability “to always extend the frameworks which attempt to contain them, to remain permeable and uncertain” (p. xviii). This offers profound possibilities for seeing and experiencing the world differently, but only if we are willing to examine and explore how our skin has moved through time and place, to arrive to this contemporary moment. This short article attempts to do just that.
This article uses data from a larger research project—a harikatha methodology that examined and explored the ways in which eight queer Desi/South Asian young adults constitute and negotiate their queer racialized bodies and what this meant for how they moved through multiple city neighborhoods—where they live, work or go to school, and spend their leisure time. Harikatha refers to a composite form of storytelling that may involve poetry, drawing, drama, music, philosophy, and so on and is used here to characterize the multiliteracies methodological value of kathas. 4 Data were gathered over 9 months in the form of a quantitative survey (n = 77), 22 hours of atmakathan 5 interviews (approx. 120 min each), almost 25 hours of “time-pass”—a colloquial word with a strong Desi sensibility that literally means “passing time with kin” (also see Bhattacharya, 2009), and almost 20 hours of embodied social practices that involved poetry, drawing, and drama. Weaving these multiliteracies together like a kantha (Hindi word for quilt—itself a storied South Asian tradition) with each method speaking to the other to evoke sometimes oppositional kathas became the cornerstone of this research. This storytelling methodology (Razack, 1993) affords an embodied encounter; an effective way to explore the multiple (and potentially contradictory) ways of being and doing “brown.”
This article is divided into three parts. First, I speak to the need for shadow work drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa (2009) and Kakali Bhattacharya (2017). Next, I lay out the two “stop moments” and discuss its “openings.” Finally, I draw on Edward Brantmeier’s (2013) conceptualization of a pedagogy of vulnerability to conclude that, as researchers, there remain possibilities for change, if we are able to explore, with honesty, our pressures, prejudices, and pain, to dialogue across difference and develop shared solidarities for creating new possibilities for qualitative research.
The “Shadow Work” Imperative
Kakali Bhattacharya (2017) argues for the possibilities and need for healing and well-being while working in higher education and engaging in social justice work. She proposes that researchers ought to develop “modes of intelligibilities for meeting the dark, disowned, scary, and painful parts of our memories and experiences” (p. 105). Extending Anzaldúa’s (2009) concept of shadow work, Bhattacharya proposes a convergence of literacy with shadow work and how this might “illuminate relationships between the self and other, self and community, and self and disowned parts of self with respect to social justice work” (p. 111). I concur and extend Bhattacharya’s logic to research—especially when one undertakes research with/in one’s own communities. What “modes of intelligibilities” or “shadow literacies” might be cultivated by engaging in such research? How might a Desi/South Asian, Brown emerging scholar negotiate and navigate the loci of power inherent in being an “outsider-within” (Collins, 1990)? In thinking back to my dissertation proposal, I always knew that there would be an autoethnographic component to my methodology. In working with queer Desis, there was going to be room for me to explore and examine the ways in which systems of power structured my own lived racialized queer experience. In choosing to situate my methodology firmly in applied drama pedagogies, it became clear that working through the border between the fictive/imagined/dramatized, and “the real” would offer many possibilities for reflexive work. What I did not plan for were the ways in which I would be challenged by my shadows.
According to Bhattacharya (2017), shadows are “parts of ourselves that we ignore or disown as something belonging to us . . . the darker parts of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge . . . parts of ourselves that embody so much pain that we ignore or avoid looking at them” (p. 112). Citing Anzaldúa (2015a), Bhattacharya contends that shadows may be passed down between generations, inherited from families, communities, and nation. She argues that meeting the darkness, seeking to explore, understand, articulate, and share it, allows us to create healing images for not just ourselves, but for our (chosen) families, communities, nation, and the world.
For me—a queer Desi “outsider-within” emerging scholar, the shadow work begins with the creative process. Anzaldúa (2015b) says The creative process is an agency of transformation. Using the creative process to heal or restructure the images/stories that shape a person’s consciousness is a more effective way of healing. When you allow the images to speak to you through the first person rather than restricting these images to the third person (things of which you speak), a dialogue—rather than a monologue—occurs. (p. 35)
Playing With Methods: Turning Toward the Stops
David Appelbaum’s (1995) notion of a “stop” refers to a moment that converges both risk and opportunity. Lynn Fels (2012, 2015) extends Appelbaum’s idea by posing the following question: How might the stop inform new understandings of what it means to collect data, analyze, interpret, and present new findings? According to Fels, “a stop arises when we are surprised or awakened to a moment; we become alert to the suspicion that something else, some other way of being in a relationship or in action, is possible” (p. 53). It can occur in “the real”—daily lived experience and interactions with others, or even through the imagined/fictive through creative play—any way in which we are able to “recognize absence, a gap, a dissonance, a possibility newly perceived” (p. 53). Methodologically, stops are moments of interruption. They provoke new questions, invite reflexivity, and facilitate new possibilities for relationships with ourselves, with others, our communities, and environments. As I reflect back on my data collection, I realize that stop moments were necessary points of invitation to engage in the shadow work that Anzaldúa and Bhattacharya reference. How and why was my methodology revealing these shadows? What about these shadows needs tending to? How might tending to them in turn shape the ways in which I (re)visit my methodology? They became “action sites of inquiry, [that] if reflected upon through a lens of inquiry, [become] embodied data” (Fels, 2012, p. 54; italics in original).
I now turn to two such stop moments in my doctoral thesis methodology that explored and examined the experiences of eight queer Desi/South Asian young adults (18-35 years) in Toronto, Canada. Each stop moment is briefly described, its opening elucidated, and then I offer provocations in the form of questions that may push a researcher to take a fresh look at their methods by (re)turning their gaze to themselves.
“This is for Those Survivors”
It is August 2016, I receive a brochure mailing from a local theater about their upcoming season and find myself perusing through it. While doing so, my eyes zone in on two words—Acha Bacha (Hindi meaning Good Boy). It is not common to find much ethnospecific theater even in a global city like Toronto, so I was immediately curious. Could it be that one of the local professional theater companies was actually staging a play about South Asians in diaspora? For the limited visibility that ethnospecific theater receives, much of it is focused on the Black and/or queer experience. It so happened that Acha Bacha (literally translates to “Good Boy”) was the title to a working script that was being workshopped at this particular theater in December. Being workshopped means that a cast was being assembled, they would rehearse with the script and a director for approximately a week, and then would perform this “work-in-progress” for an audience, who are then invited to provide feedback on the clarity of the plot, characters, staging, and so on. Furthermore, I would learn upon further exploration that Acha Bacha was about two queer South Asian Muslim boys who negotiate their sexual identities with their religion and ethnoculture in diaspora.
Much of the ethnospecific theater has focused on the Black and/or the queer experience. To stumble on a piece of theater that was about queer Desis/South Asians, no matter how raw in its development, seemed too good to be true. Given that my methodology was anchored in using drama methods, this seemed like a perfect opportunity for my participants to watch the show, provide feedback, and then have a follow-up conversation about what it was like to watch their identities and experiences on stage. It could become a data point, an important triangulation to their own roles as creators of improvised pieces through the applied drama methods I would implement. As I attempted to integrate this new idea into my existing methods, I decided to host my drama workshop with my participants on the same day that Acha Bacha would be staged. In this way, I would have warmed up my participants and end the day with a night out at the theater. In addition, I really wanted to connect with the queer South Asian playwright to learn more about the play and how it could help my work.
Sitting down with the playwright, Bilal, became important for me. I wanted to get a sense of their inspiration for the script, how they wanted to see it play out within the multiple communities it seemed to involve—ethnic, religious, gender, race, sexuality. Below is an excerpt from the interview I had with the Bilal that immobilized me. It became a stop.
So who’s the play for?
This was a lovely discovery I had, because I went back and forth and all over the place. I think that what I had said to you last week was that the play was birthed out of a need to survive. Like I would not, and I can say it—I would not be here today wearing these boots if it wasn’t for writing this play at the time that I did. And that survival . . . the need to survive by writing this play meant to me that it is for survivors of trauma. I’m not an expert on what trauma looks like on different types of experiences, but this one is I’m examining—I’m examining sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse in the play, emotional and mental abuse and all that is kind of tied in with shame. So survivors of those [experiences], you know? It is for those survivors. I think it might be too bold for me to say that the play is for all survivors, because I don’t know what that means. But I think that is who I’m writing for, I’m writing for the people I know in my life and dream about in the world who have survived.
Opening
The word “survivor” means different things to different people. As a survivor of sexual assault when I was 12 years old, I realized that Bilal was talking about me. I will admit that I have not thought about that assault in over a decade. But the details of that day, the time (in broad daylight), and the stillness of the quiet main street on which it appeared are forever etched in my mind. But Bilal’s words took me there and I was not ready. Making sense of the guilt, shame, and victim-blaming that often comes with sexual assault is not a finite process, rather a lifelong one. Wrapped up in that was also the fact that at the time, I had no concept of life as an out gay or queer man. I was not questioning my sexuality at the time. Therefore, survival has occurred on multiple levels in multiple contexts. And it took Bilal, their play, these words to get me to realize this. I acknowledge here that (assault) was my shadow that needed work on. It facilitated a recognition of multiple other shadows cast upon this one. Different sources of light cast different kinds of shadows and this will be different for each person.
My engagement with Bilal also made me question my privileged position as a researcher interested in working with my queer Desi community. How could I be of service to this playwright who is doing the important work of sharing our most vulnerable experiences on stage? How could I leave open the possibilities of having the playwright hear from my participants, engage with my participants within and outside the planned drama work? And what of my communities? How might I be of service to them?
My conversation with Bilal prompted me to shift focus from centering the research and myself as implicated in it by virtue of my role as the researcher, to thinking through my participants and the community at large. This harikatha methodology had many stories to tell. It needed to place individual’s stories in conversation with community narratives. The participants in my study are continuously maneuvering a myriad of intersecting (and at times oppositional) local, national, and global discourses about race, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, sexuality, citizenship, socioeconomic class, and religion to name a few. Each acknowledges that there is no easy resolution to how they navigate and negotiate their social location. How does a researcher respond to these shifting tensions and possibilities? Too often, traditional qualitative methodologies (including ethnographies) lock researchers into only those things that occur or were spoken in a particular moment and mobilize them as grounds for ethnographic authority. However, as Kathleen Gallagher (2014) argues, when used methodologically as spaces for exploration, stories can be consensus-resisting and dialectical.
My encounter with Acha Bacha and playwright Bilal necessitated a return to the institutional ethics review process because it constituted a significant change to my research. The amendment process was a challenge, and it amounted to being asked to reconsider the lower end of the age range for participants and change it from 16 years (initially proposed and approved) to 18 years (age of majority). In the interest of time, I complied because the workshop date was quickly emerging and I really did not want to lose out on the opportunity. In addition, I felt very strongly about my commitment to the playwright. Furthermore, I had not yet received any interest from those who were below the age of 18 years. My supervisor and I agreed that if I did get someone who was under 18 years and interested, we could deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
My initial conversations with the playwright, their subsequent immersion in the project’s drama work a month later, and our ongoing conversations have allowed me to become a spectator to my own methodology. As a key informant, Bilal has watched the methodology and especially the drama work unfold. So through my conversations with them, I’ve been able to engage in the luxury of watching my methodology as an audience member, even if brief. I could have played this safe. I could have used my positionality as a researcher and exploited the opportunity by taking my participants to the workshopped performance, letting them provide feedback (if they chose to), and then not sharing their feedback with the playwright. In doing so, I would have reproduced the very colonizing practices that ethnographic research has been guilty of (Smith, 1999/2012). Instead, it became about figuring out a way to de/colonize this new relationship and data point, in a way that would be mutually fulfilling.
Provocations
What responsibilities do researchers have to the communities from which their participants emerge? How might engaging with shadow work facilitate de/colonial possibilities to doing research as an “outsider-within”? What pedagogical value does shadow work hold for researchers seeking to develop culturally sustaining methodologies and innovative methods?
“Can We Change the Prompt?”
It is January 2017. It has been just over a month since my participants and I convened for the first of 2 days of playing with drama methods. I made the conscious decision toward the end of that first day to split the drama workshop days up rather than do them consecutively. My participants were exhausted after Day 1 and we still had the Acha Bacha performance that night. I was able to recognize and respond to the need for my participants (and I as well) to take care of ourselves, given the emotional labor involved with speaking our multiple truths.
This particular stop moment occurred during the second day of my drama workshop. I facilitated a Boalian technique of the Empty Chair. Here, participants are offered a prompt. They line up one behind the other and are expected to enter into role, where they approach the empty chair, and in-role, speak out two to three words based on the prompt. After they have done this, they return to the back of the line. After all participants have had a turn, the sequence repeats until the facilitator changes the prompt. I pick up this exercise at the point where I present the following prompt to participants: Things that have been said to you or you’ve (over)heard being said to a fellow queer Desi/South Asian.
Exotic.
Stop being so selfish.
Smells like curry.
Beautiful!
Don’t attract too much attention.
Resilient.
What’s that smell?
You know, we’re not that different.
Where are you from?
You’re too small.
I’ve always wanted to be with a Brown person.
You’re not like the other Brown guys I’ve dated.
Where did you learn that?
Terrorist.
No—we have had learning.
But you don’t look Brown.
Why do you always have to talk about that.
Wow. You don’t have an accent.
Namaste.
You’re not Brown enough.
When did you come here?
I love curry.
So what should I do in India when I go visit?
Sexy.
Oh, my god. I love Bollywood.
You’re from Pakistan. How is your English so good?
Do you know that song? That song from that film?
What was the boat ride like?
Oh, Tamil. You mean like the Tamil Tigers. You guys are terrorists, right?
At this point, participants have broken sequence. Not everyone is heading up for a turn, and the earlier momentum is slowing.
Maybe you are white enough to meet me.
You look so interesting.
You don’t look South Asian.
I’m so glad I’m not fresh off the boat.
Why are you eating with your hands?
Maybe if you just went to the gym.
So are you hairy or smooth under there?
At this point, one of the young adults, Santosh (23 years old, Indo-Fijian, gay, male) blurts out what everyone is thinking: “Can we change the prompt?”
Opening
In this particular activity, I was moving between facilitating and participating in the activity. After offering instruction, I too joined in the line and offered my observations, drawing from the energies that had been generated with each additional contribution made to the empty chair. As the activity progressed, I had noticed that the pace had slowed and that the contributions were tending toward deficit/negative attitudes toward the community. However, I was not attuned to the impact in the way I should have been.
Researchers are not always correct and we do not always get it right. What matters most is what we do when we realize that it did not turn out the way it was planned. Sometimes we tell ourselves to let an uncomfortable moment simply be that moment. For example, when a participant asks for space, we give it to them. Perhaps we follow-up directly or indirectly later, but we tend to leave it, placing the responsibility on the participant to reenter the space and reengage. But what do we do in the process as researcher and facilitator? When we do recalibrate? What does that look like?
This exchange prompted me to change my method of conducting participant observation and my approach to the final interview. Initially, the proposed plan for participant observation included attending events or gatherings that the participant shortlisted and observing them to interact and engage with these environments. I anticipated that the agency afforded to participants by way of shortlisting these events, and my perception that I would always respond to any shift in their comfort level during the event, was enough of a safeguard against any violence that could occur. After this stop moment, I made the conscious decision to move away from participant observation as I envisioned it. I decided to allow the participant to pick a place of their choosing; a favorite spot in the city, and we would journey there together and experience it. Such a process is reminiscent of Geertz’ (1998) concept of “deep hanging out.” However, the stop moment made me recognize the need to not place that level of pressure on this follow-up interaction. Therefore, I prefer to term my shift in participant observation as “time-pass”—a colloquial word with a strong Desi sensibility that literally means “passing time with kin” (Also see Bhattacharya, 2009).
Being aware of how our research methods and methodologies, no matter how creative and innovative, can still enact violence on and with participants, is a sobering call to action. Such a reality check takes on more meaning when it comes through research with one’s own historically marginalized community. It necessitates the need for vulnerability to engage in the continual evaluation of power dynamics inherent in a researcher–participant relationship and the question of accountability and responsibilities, ethical and otherwise, to the communities we seek to contribute toward. Engaging with vulnerability, courageously, is central to tending to shadow work. As Bhattacharya (2017) contends, “Explor[ing] the interiority of one’s experiences help[s] build reserves for social justice work, identifying how and when we feel drained, establishing triggers and alarms, and identifying the ways we can work with social justice agendas” without being stuck between oppositional discourses (p. 121).
Provocations
What are the ways in which our methodologies and methods enact or are complicit with structural violence on our most vulnerable participants? How do we structurally respond to being called out on our researcher positionality in our work? What implications does this have for “outsider-within” research?
Toward Methodology as a Pedagogy of Vulnerability: Not an End, But a Starting Point
“Are you going to study those we have lost?,” he asked point blank and without so much as hesitation to his voice. I stared back bewildered. I had only just explained my thesis project to the man sitting across from me at a Fund Development Standing Committee for the AIDS Service Organization on whose board I was voted to serve on as Director only two months ago. “I am documenting the experiences of queer Desis/South Asians in Toronto. I am looking at those 16-35 because of my area—I’m in education. It would help so many - I’m hoping the stories can help this organization!” I replied. “So can these,” he shot back, “We need to—before they are lost!” he trailed off. (Field notes, May 12, 2016)
I bring up this final interaction with someone I consider to be a queer Desi elder from the Toronto community that occurred in the midst of my data collection process. What this interaction activated for me was a huge sense of guilt. To whom am I accountable? And in what ways? I did not have a response to this vulnerable moment but it did make me pause and think of my role as a researcher committed to doing work with my communities. It made me consider how I might use my arts-informed research agenda to cut across time and space by placing this contemporary moment in conversation with a historical and archived one. It made me consider the role of intergenerational cultural exchange, the value of oral histories, and how such knowledges are lived in a comparative diasporic context (e.g., Desi diasporas by way of Kenya, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, etc.). As Fels (2012) so calls to us What and how we choose to engage in our research, our theatre, our lives speaks to the risk, the opportunity offered by each stop we encounter in our performative explorations with others . . . As educators and researchers, as learners, we are called to listen, to be compassionately and ethically wide awake (Greene, 1978), to mindfully attend to the present moment and all its possibilities. (p. 54)
Edward Brantmeier (2013) has conceptualized a pedagogy of vulnerability in teacher education that might be especially useful to qualitative researchers as well. According to Brantmeier, “a pedagogy of vulnerability challenges [you] to render [your] frames of knowing, feeling, and doing vulnerable . . . [to] open yourself, contextualize that self in societal constructs and systems, co-learn, admit you do not know, and be human” (p. 96). What might this look like for a qualitative researcher? What might “work/think/play” look like through a pedagogy of vulnerability? Thinking through methodology as a pedagogy of vulnerability requires a profound sensibility that accounts for the historical (and very often violent) power dynamics between a researcher and the researched. Echoing Paulo Freire’s (1970/1996) notion of student-as-teacher as teacher-as-learner, Brantmeier views vulnerability as a willingness to engage risk. As Brantmeier (2013) continues A pedagogy of vulnerability is about taking risks—risks of self-disclosure, risks of change, risks of not knowing, risks of failing—to deepen learning. Vulnerability is an act of courage. An attitude of not knowing, of discovery, and of critical self-dialogue steer a pedagogy of vulnerability. (p. 96)
As I reflect on the methodological turns my research has taken over the last 2 years, and the choices that lie ahead in how I write out my analysis and tell these stories, I am grateful for the lessons in vulnerability afforded to me through my stop moments. It has allowed me to renegotiate my nonnegotiables (working with my communities), reexamine my values (what does de/colonial mean for me in the context of my own story/diasporic journey), and rethink the ways in which I work and play through my research. But perhaps more importantly, it has allowed me to simultaneously do the shadow work—embrace the painful, ugly, angry, hurt, and damaged parts of me. It has allowed me to rediscover the erased and buried parts of me and renegotiate my relationship with them, offering new and deeper insights into how they permeate into my consciousness both as a researcher, educator, and human.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
