January 24, 2015 - 09:52
These are partial, impressionist notes meant as take-off points, not digests. Enjoy and please feel warmly invited to comment below.
TUCK
Why do you think Tuck begins the piece by emphasizing the concept and experience of home?
What do you make of her formatting the piece as a letter? How is this different from Duckworth's format? How does it shape audience expectations? How does it empower audience?
How are the rights of indigenous peoples important to a consideration of empowerment with respect to people from dominant groups and nations/contexts, as well? See p. 415, as well, for a linked discussion about how the naturalization of a colonialist, oppressive context contributes to a forgetting of the political roots of individuals' struggles.
Another way to put this: What is the proper unit of analysis for liberatory research?
411-12 "overresearched, yet made invisible"
412: "I write to you now because I believe that our communities can exercise a bounty of decision- making power in these issues. Further, because so many outsiders benefit from depicting communities as damaged, it will have to be these same communities that hold researchers accountable for the frameworks and attitudes they employ."
Important issues of agency and authority over knowledge-making. Who benefits from different forms of research and invervention? This will connect with Appadurai's "The Right to Research."
How does this connect with Dass and Gorman's idea of "helping prison?" With McDermott and Varenne's "Culture as Disability?"
Is Duckworth's article from last time damage-centered, even though it ostensibly focuses on "successful" people?
"In damaged-centered research, one of the major activities is to document pain or loss in an individual, community, or tribe. Though connected to deficit models—frameworks that emphasize what a particular student, family, or com- munity is lacking to explain underachievement or failure—damage-centered research is distinct in being more socially and historically situated. It looks to historical exploitation, domination, and colonization to explain contemporary brokenness, such as poverty, poor health, and low literacy. Common sense tells us this is a good thing, but the danger in damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community. Here’s a more applied definition of damage-centered research: research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation." (413)
Theory of change introduced on p 413. What is Duckworth's implicit theory of change? What scale of change is the grit narrative concerned with? What theory of change is the "Batman" story concerned with?
414: "This policy and others, such as mayoral control in New York City that has systematically closed down all avenues for community participation in school decision making (YRNES, 2008), collude in the production of damage-driven data and, indeed, in the production of damage."
This connects with Batman -- damage driven data collection and beliefs therefrom can contribute to creating damage.
414: Does the construction of damage narratives help correct oppression? Or perhaps solidify it?
416: importance of attending to the queer kiss, not only the bruises and broken bones. De-pathologizing strategies.
418: "Desire is not merely wanting but informed seeking" -- can desire be a form of research?
419-20:
Desire is a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance. It is neither/both/
419-20: Desire is a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance. . . . This is important because it more closely matches the experiences of people who, at different points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/ fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures—that is, everybody.
420: "Complex personhood" -- admits of contradiction, locates the individual in flows of history and collectivity.
422: Importance of attending to "intricacies of people's lives." This connects with mindfulness work of gentle and precise attention. Also to recent brain research about how every single experience is imprinted in the brain.
422: "survivance" -- moving "beyond survival to create spaces of of synthesis and renewal."
424: "regeneration: "For some, a moratorium may signal an end or a sense of finality. To me, a moratorium provides an opportunity for what Indigenous scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2005) calls regeneration, “the direct application of acting against our ingrained and oppressive fears” (p. 151). It is simultaneously an acknowledg- ment of historic pain and taking action against that pain in order to reframe that history."
Moving against fear connects with Batman, grit, and mindfulness . . . the fear can be socially constructed, and can be changed.