Open Journals at Memorial University
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Racialized Discourses: Writing Against an Essentialized Story About Racism
No full textThis paper is concerned with the ethics of knowledge production when conducting research on racial injustice. The discussion draws upon my doctoral research, in which I interviewed 23 racialized social workers in Toronto, Canada, about their encounters with racism in the workplace. The discussion centres on my role as a racialized researcher and the effects of any assumed “insider-ness” on how I heard and interpreted participant narratives. Although the workers and I shared experiences of racism, I could not assume “sameness,” nor could I adopt an authentic voice about how racism is experienced. This paper examines the significance of producing research about racial domination, but argues for an anti-essentialist stance. I explore the ethical dilemmas involved through examining the dominant assumptions underlying insider research
The “Will to Participate”: Governmentality, Power, and Community-based Participatory Research
No full textAlthough critiques of participatory development attend to knowledge/power, Anglo- American literature on community-based participatory research (CBPR) is largely silent on the politics of these collaborations. As the “will to participate” is increasingly normalized for communities and CBPR is naturalized as socially just research, it is crucial that we inquire into the uneven terrain of the collaborative encounter. The CBPR literature makes claims to emancipatory, empowering, and egalitarian relations that articulate a largely unproblematic, harmonious encounter. Yet these claims remain under-scrutinized. Furthermore, little is known of how participatory practices operate as a technique to access and appropriate community knowledge, while leaving power asymmetries intact. This paper deploys a Foucauldian governmentality framework to explore how CBPR’s relations of power collude with the macro rationalities of the neo-liberalism, inclusive liberalism, and the moral imperialisms of the knowledge economy to produce participatory subjects and spaces “outside” of socio-political histories and presents. Critical reflections on two CBPR projects are woven into a theoretical reading that explores the limits of participatory approaches and its uneven power relations as ethical problems
Between Violence and Its Representation: Ethics, Archival Research, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in the Telling of Torture Stories
No full textThis paper explores the ethics of archival research by reflecting on the challenges of doing research with highly descriptive and gruesome archived testimonies of torture. This reflection leads me to unpack the character of archives and research as power/knowledge devices that at their very core imply violence: a violence of representation enacted in the representation of violence. I propose that the inseparable representation-violence relationship requires that we situate ourselves in the narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation in order to turn representation into a performative, discursive, and self-constituting ethics in which we can engage in political and strategic practices of representation
Editorial: "The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge Production," Critical Reflections on Social Work and Social Sciences Research
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A Contexting of First Attempts at Functional Research
Get PDFAn extended reflection on the first efforts of the SGEME seminar in functional reserach
Jaywalking Through Intersectionalities
No full textSocial workers, especially those who call for anti-oppressive practice, have embraced and promoted an analysis of intersectionality or the interlocking of oppression. These proponents view their work as critical, postmodern, self-reflective, reflexive, and progressive. Their focal concern is with the interaction of identity categories. This paper sets out an alternative way of working and making sense. I am not interested in the noisy traffic of categories or even identities. Intersectionality is a signal light on an imaginary street. Instead, I insist social workers must be pedestrians and pedestrian. We need to recognize and navigate the ground and pathways of ordinary and daily life. Our focus needs to be on just how, in and through an unbroken flow of movement, we produce and reproduce recognizably and putatively iterative forms of action and the knowledge linked to action. We ask: How do our every-day/every-night activities give rise to, contradict, fulfill, or fail an unfolding landscape of idealities and recognitions of identities. Social workers need a return to the social as practically accomplished and as realized day in, day out. Through an ethnomethodology of practice we return to social interactions and social relations, presence and absence, local and extra-local through which we collectively produce, not once and for all, but as emerging, developing, changing, transforming, the signals and signs of our identities
Working Towards a Standard Model
Get PDFA discusion of a central goal in the development of functional collaboration, the shift toward the persuit of a standard model for the science and for collaboration grounded in the core methodlogy of generalized empirical method
The End of Lonerganism: Fuse or Refuse
Get PDFA challenge to Lonergan studies to shift its attention to functional collaboratio
From Activists to Terrorists: The Politics and Ethics of Research Representations of Transnational Resistance
No full textThis paper reflects critically on our ethical responsibilities as social work researchers who report on transnational resistance movements in the age of terrorism. Through my own research on the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests in Canada, I problematize why and how research representations of racialized activists and activisms come to be profoundly political. I reflect on how a research project is framed, how the researcher and participants are involved, how attention is paid to ethical issues, and the extent of critical reflexivity around how movements are represented. Recognizing that all activism is socially constructed and that research labels inform social identities and social practices, I also examine contested categories of resistance to unpack how they inform or challenge dominant constructions of migrants, their activism, and their struggles in relation to Canada’s own context of separatism, sovereignty, and colonization. Rather than employ any one term to refer to a singular narrative of transnational resistance in our research, I argue that we foreground the power structures and global relations that fundamentally mark colonized identities and their activism across spaces and movements. I draw upon Indigenous, critical, and anti-oppressive research approaches to centre the transgressive potential of decolonial representation and resistance