The Role and Everyday Life Experiences of Latin American Female Researchers in Academia

Introduction

Researching on the everyday life experiences of us women who conduct qualitative research in academia implies a double challenge: on one hand, it relates to the ethic of coherence, between what we want to relay as generating spaces of critical thinking and our own experiences lived in our women in the academia bodies in relation to oppression, respect, dignity, the sound of our female voices that resist machismo, the uses and abuses of power according to hierarchies determined by gender, class, socioeconomic status, cofradias generally led by males as these are groups exclusive for men, in and from where machismo is evident as a validated way of understanding gender, and of behaving and relating within academic spaces. These are ways of understanding gender, behaving and relating in these same spaces according to our female colleagues and also according to machismo expressions not clearly identified, assumed, acknowledged, however, installed with enough force and rigidity as to determine the academic lives of many of us, according to what is expected not only from Latin American universities but also from universities throughout the world.

Then, we wonder, as Deborah Britzman states, “what then is it for feminist research to promise empathy, power sharing, sincerity, and representation when these values must pass through inequality, disappointment, and misunderstanding?” (Bloom, 1998, p. xi), which is something that commonly happens in the reality of our higher education institutions. In Latin American contexts, we see ourselves facing what Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) refers to as internal colonialism, which derives from the double difficulty that women face when it comes to being a woman and being indigenous.

At the same time, what can we do for our work not to be left alone in the disconsolate weeping or the anger for the injustices to which we are constantly faced by our role as women in the academy? Which is the sign of hope to continue doing this work? Why should we do this?

The second problem/challenge I have detected is as follows:

How conducting research about our everyday life academic experiences is related to our affects (without even thinking on causality, but in a certain way thinking about it) and to our experiences in qualitative research? In this desired coherence, we are differentiating, evidencing the obstacle, and clarifying a field undermined by history and a context difficult to demolish. It is about researching through our bodies, our histories, our emotions, and our interactions, which will undoubtedly be different not only depending on the gender but also depending on our biographies, cultures, contexts, personal moments, and, at the same time, the focus and epiphanies in our research projects (Denzin, 2014; Pelias, 2014), what in the eyes of science will be obstacles, understood as that vulnerable part, or as Britzman points out, alluding to the work of Leslie Rebecca Bloom in her book Under the Sign of Hope: Feminist Methodology and Narrative Interpretation: “while feminist research methodology must begin with an awareness for women’s vulnerability in the world, Bloom admits a more intimate tension, namely the vulnerability within each woman as she attempts to occupy their stories” (Britzman, 1998, p. xi). In other words, how we can use our gender as a way of apprehending reality and get closer to the subjects we study with extreme sensitivity and subtlety.

Thus, for example, in the study of childhood in phenomena such as migration in educational contexts in rural border towns in the extreme north of Chile, my other research project currently in development, I reveal myself as a female researcher that relates to the children who attend the classes that I visit, from the affection and love I have for this project. On other hand, they, the children under study, whose lives are the focus of the research (Bloom, 1998) depending on the school, relate to me in different ways, more or less stable between one and another visit that I make, each time with greater confidence, as if I were their head teacher, an adult in charge of their care, in most cases, as a second mom without being this precisely the link, as an aunt, a friend. Always in a very humane way. In this sense, the feminist interpretation acts as a lens to understand the background behind the interactions and the social relations—also affective—of the children of the immigrants with their Chilean classmates, their teachers, the school system.

In a stage of life—my life—women tend to represent a maternal figure in their lives and the relationships between researchers and the researched tend to be shaded in trust, attitudes, and demands of a relationship that starts from the experience of these children with their primary meaningful figures, among them the maternal figure, as a way of socializing. In this interaction, now with me, as a researcher, I asked myself constantly what I mean to them. While I am aware that the way they relate with me varies from school to school, from a rurality with a greater Bolivian and Peruvian presence to the city, where there is a greater presence of the Chilean children (e.g., Zapata-Sepúlveda, 2017, 2018).

At times in which, it seems that the “traditional” qualitative research about the researcher and the researched barriers do not exist, and as if I were a special guest to their class, or even as if I were a classmate. As Bloom (1998) said, it is “about ethics, reflexivity, emotions, positionality, polyvocality, collaboration, identification with participants, intersubjectivity, and our own authority as interpreters” (p. 2). Different from what it could possibly be from a non-feminist perspective. That is how I become anxious when I find out that two immigrant children from Bolivian origin, aged 8 and 10, do not have a mother. I see them all the time working on the work their teacher assigns them, very obedient, silent, always looking at their copybooks with a pencil in their hands while their classmates are talking, playing, and doing silly things. While their classmates are acting as children. I ask myself what life would be like to these children whose parents have had to migrate for a better financial future, neglecting family networks and leaving behind all they had in their country of origin to achieve a better financial stability in their homes, thinking of a better future, which can ensure them bringing home the food and provide their children with a better education. Then I ask myself about how much I would be willing to give to support the unprotected childhood in my country, once this project is finished.

At the same time, research becomes a hope of change and in a new power that emerges as the confidence in us to fulfill this. This kind of research deals also with the limitations in research and the limits that we need to start to deconstruct between ourselves. These limits, as Bloom states, have to do with a long story of our lives associated to the marginalization, patriarchal oppression, colonization, physical abuse, the psychological harm of being degraded by a generalized hierarchical structure of gender differences about the masculine and the feminine, and the negative and conflicting ideas of what us ourselves have internalized about what it means to be a woman. Conducting feminist research, even if it is about subjectivities more than a subjective way of researching, is about a power supply for women. This power is shown when we are there and we want to make it perfect. When we see in the vulnerable look of the other, our look. When we empathize with the disadvantage of the ones without a voice, linking it to our biographies, and when we do research on sensitive topics in contexts of oppression toward the oppressed. In this case, toward what in Chile is considered as marginal, the indigenous, the foreigner from Latin American countries, the neglected infancy.

From a feminist interpretation, in a non-unitary subjectivity approach, it will always be about researching in dual realities. Conducting research about women in academia is conducting qualitative research from our voices. However, I have gotten funding from the most important fund in my country to conduct research on how the interactions and social relations of the children of the immigrant are in the schools in Arica, in a very classic way (mixed methods, Nvivo, thematic content analysis) which ventures with multimethod data collection strategies. At the same time, and as another duality, developing a parallel line which is profound and specific, that of interpretive autoethnography from my own voice, digging deeper on those epiphanies and magical moments of research, according also to my genealogy from a feminist postmodern interpretive critical practices, as Bloom would say it.

Even though it wasn’t me who recognized the feminism within my research work, the interpretation I do in both projects I have mentioned here is focused on voices of women and their experiences. At the same time, and as another duality, it is related to “the analytic deconstruction of the very category of women” (in Bloom, 1998, p. 7).

I can also see the differences between the children according to whether they are male or female and how the powers of the masculine over the feminine organize the space for them. I see a classroom in which there are four rows of two children per desk and six desks per row; the two rows at the center are occupied by boys and the two rows on the sides (one to each extreme of the room) are occupied by girls. Even more so, one of these rows is facing a wall.

I also observe how a girl who is taller than the average of the boys pushes other boys with all her might, and the boys tell her angrily and as an answer to her pushing them: you are a male! As if it were an offense. Or in a group interview, a group of girls from a rural area of Andean origin tell the only brunet without Andean features: You do not have a color; you cry over everything. You act like a male! As an offense, making again a distinction between having an Andean background (most of the class) and the brunet girl.

Where chance does not exist and a dual hierarchical order is imposed that forms a particular habitus, as Bourdieu (1990) would say, I face a new barrier in doing this type of research, that of not being able to say something that breaks the hierarchies already set in primary education classes about an established social order based on the feminine and masculine gender. I cannot do anything, and as Behar says when citing Gertz, I mean those moments when we become a vulnerable observer (Behar, 1996), at least in the phase in which I find myself. Classroom observation. In this sense, both an approach from genealogy and from interpretation need to be combined to bring to the table the hegemonic demands of the dominant interpretations. From this dual focus, feminist research allows us to emphasize “the importance of deep interpretations of personal narratives through which we gain greater understanding of women’s lived experiences and the concrete realities of daily life, while simultaneously deconstructing those foundations on which daily life is constructed and experienced” (Bloom, 1998, p. 8), now, in and from my public sphere in a public and regional university in northern Chile.

To conclude, I’m starting to study feminist methodologies after last year my sponsor told me that my work is about feminism. When I heard him (them) say that, I was a little shocked because I never situated my voice as a feminist. But from last year, I have been finding some proximity to this kind of methodologies, from where I write, as a beginner. As I have been attending to pole dance classes these last few days at UIUC Campus, and I challenge my own prejudices about gender, imagined harmony of movements when I turn around with my own body, as well as challenging gravity with my body at 41 years old and more than one accident marked in my bones, which I forget with short lyrics, slow movements each time more and more in suspension that I give each day, gaining bruises as small trophies, learning how to accommodate my bones and muscles in a vertical metal bar, in the same way I define each step of my projects learning from these methodologies.

My expectation with this is to be able to discover a methodology of the heart connected to Latin American roots; to the autochthonous culturally diverse, which allows us to interpret the local reality acknowledging and valuing the cultural richness in the center where I conduct research about the land, my land. The periphery of the country, or the main gate for terrestrial entry for Latin American immigrants, seen from the colonized eyes even in the same country: the border region of Arica and parinacota. From this point, as in proximal latitudes, “the subordinate status of indians and women to the populist horizon and the fragility of a sovereignty set on the negation and the self-negation” (Rivera-Cusicanque, 2015, p. 30), we have the challenge of coherence between a decolonized and de-colonizing discourse, the generation of research which is situated and connected with the culturally diverse environments in silenced societies, from our voices of women in the current academia, relieving our biographies, myths, and ancestral histories from our indigenous communities, interconnected to a global world, the one of the prevailing science stemming from the countries that govern knowledge and from the construction of our realities.

The challenge is set on reviewing our typologies to understand our communities, our ways of researching from our role of women in academia, and uncover knowledge that constantly forces to transform it and to transform ourselves in the coherence or the balance between what has been learnt, discovered, and our ways of being in the world, acknowledging the differences in gender, origin, and biographies; acknowledging the education we have received, our biographies, and how this is present in our ways of conducting research, in the questions we are interested in answering, and in our ways of participating and influencing the world from academia—in this case from the field of public education in the border area.