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Becoming a Scholar‐Advocate: Participatory Research with Children

2008; Wiley; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00610.x

1467-8330

Meghan Cope,

Participatory Visual Research Methods

I have long felt for myself, and have advised my students, that the best scholarship comes from the heart and has the potential to resonate broadly around an important problem. In part, finding one's niche based on one's true interests is important for sustaining the energy and commitment that are needed for long-term projects. I believe this forms the foundations of good public scholarship because issues we care deeply about are the ones for which we make extra efforts to reach out, disseminate, and advocate. However, there are always challenges along the way because much of our research—especially that involving participatory types of ethnography—involves slow, steady, often mundane tasks and it can be hard to keep our eyes on the bigger picture. My own graduate work in urban geography was historical and generated a certain frustration for me in that I felt I could do little to make my subjects' lives better; after all, they had already passed away. While there are certain comforts in researching the past, and there are rich traditions of public scholarship based on historical work (cf Patricia Limerick's contribution to this volume), when I started my first tenure-track job I made a strategic decision that I would take a break from dusty archives. I wanted to work with real, live people and I hoped that my research would have a direct impact on people's lives. I had rosy visions of becoming a scholar whose sensitive and revelatory fieldwork with marginalized social groups would quickly cause policy to shift, lift the burdens of poverty, sexism, and racism, and facilitate new means of empowerment. Needless to say, things haven't worked out that way (at least so far!), but in many ways my youthful optimism and ignorance served me well. If I had known then about how intransigent the forces of oppression are I may never have started along the path I am still traveling. As part of this, I have come to see that public scholarship need not necessarily be about large-scale or rapid social change. I have come to appreciate the value of listening to people, and of the small, incremental steps that may take years to lead to something more, but that often lead to something better. Several years into my first job, I finally took my own advice and turned to a longstanding interest in two topics—cities and children. I combined these passions in a proposal that was funded by the NSF (mirabile dictu!) and many years later I still love the topic and am learning new things every day. The Children's Urban Geographies project ultimately looks very little like what I imagined at first (in part because of the difference between starry-eyed envisioning and the actual material and personal realities of research), but in countless ways I think it has turned out better. Reflecting on this project and its spin-offs allows me to identify points of progress (and many challenges) towards public scholarship and advocacy, and also to consider the meanings of "scholar-advocate" that resonate most strongly. One could say that there are some commonalities between cities and children. They are both complicated and contradictory. They are messy, but also fascinating and surprising and lovable. We constantly try to analyze them and understand them while also recognizing that these goals are impossible. And both cities and children simultaneously embody the cumulative past of human endeavors, while representing our best attempts at creating new futures. There is always a risk of romanticizing cities and children, taking their quirks and misdeeds as symbolic of their fundamental complexity. So a project built around how children conceptualize their city and urban spaces within it, as well as how the city incorporates, accommodates, ignores, or even harms its younger residents, is fraught with potential scholarly pitfalls, as well as opportunities. The Children's Urban Geographies project (ChUG) began with a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2000, part of a program intended to fund junior scholars in work that combined research with innovative teaching and public service. The original goals for ChUG included filling a perceived gap in the urban geography literature by discovering how children conceptualize urban space. But there were also practical considerations such as testing new participatory research methods, creating a service-learning course for university students to get involved with an after-school program, exposing low-income children of color to the field and practice of geography (especially to get beyond memorization-based school versions of the discipline), strengthening relations between the university and the local community, and creating on-line activity plans based on participatory research. These goals have been achieved for the most part, though it is impossible for me to know the impacts of some of our activities. For example, did we make enough of an impression on any of the children to lead them into a career in geography or urban studies? This is an important question for public scholars: unlike "regular" academia, with its citation indices and impact factors, the effects and outcomes of much of what we do involving "the public" as research subjects, local communities, non-profit organizations, etc, are often untraceable and unknowable. Just when I wonder if I spent five years throwing my efforts down the drain, I receive some little gem of feedback that suggests that those efforts indeed had some kind of impact after all—a postcard from a former student thanking me for changing the way she sees things, a call from a community member who saw a newspaper article about my work and wants to know how to make his town more child friendly, an inquiry from an organization in Buffalo, NY looking for suggestions on getting youth involved in their tree-planting efforts, and so on. Thank goodness for these small tokens, for they truly sustain me! One of the implicit goals of ChUG was to construct a project with children that was not concerned with educating or socializing them, but rather, with listening to and learning from them. I felt from the start that kids living in the neighborhoods of Buffalo surrounding my research site knew far more than I about their city streets, blocks, and the hidden sub-texts of the social landscape. This feeling meshed well with theoretical trends in the "new social studies of childhood", in which child-centered research is highly valued. Being both a mother and a professor, one of my greatest challenges in the project was the struggle to move away from the constant "teaching moments" and didactic mode of interacting with children that comes to me most naturally. I had to force myself to put the participants' interests, views, and ideas at the center. The second greatest challenge was getting university students to think this way too. This shift in perspective was also representative of a larger move towards becoming a more careful researcher and a better advocate for children's interests and needs with respect to their urban neighborhoods. I see this development as critical to a more nuanced meaning of public scholarship, which rests firmly on the traditions and principles of feminist research and epistemologies. When most Americans think of who constitutes "the public", they probably don't include poor, urban, Hispanic and African–American children. By bracketing my adultist agenda and being critically reflective of my own position with the children in the project, I was creating an opportunity for this multiply oppressed social group to become"the public". As they became "the public", I became a public scholar—the two processes were mutually constitutive. In this way, actively receiving the wisdom and knowledge of the children about their urban spaces allowed me to be of service to them, in part by legitimating their ideas as worthy of attention. I became a public scholar through this process in the sense that I not only listened to an often-silenced group, but I began to serve as their interlocutor in both formal and informal ways. I cannot speak for the children involved in the project but I can speak up for them. While I feel uncomfortable about stepping into this self-appointed (though hard-earned) position, I also feel that there are so few voices for children with respect to issues such as public space and neighborhoods that they need me. And further, although I cannot truly represent the children who shared their ideas and thoughts with me, as a feminist academic and an ethnographer I can identify commonalities, see patterns and understand their underlying processes, and put children's views into a larger picture that has a potentially broader impact. In these ways I consider myself and the ChUG project to be examples of a variety of homegrown public scholarship. In many ways the ChUG project reflects my feminism too, though we did only limited gender-focused work in the everyday practice of the project. I have always taken feminism to mean the active resistance to oppression on the basis of unequal power relations of many varieties (not just gender) because power relations are so deeply inter-woven. So, my commitment to participatory research inherently demanded that I bracket my own positions in order to listen adequately, while simultaneously recognizing that my interpretations were always saturated with my positions as adult, white, educated, middle-class, suburban, etc; this is a trick feminists have long struggled over with varying degrees of success. This also demanded a certain level of reflexivity in the project—I had to maintain a critical edge to consider the ways my own assumptions and knowledge were shaping the research practice and results—and here the involvement of student researchers who were engaged in the service-learning component of the project was absolutely essential. They kept me honest through their own first encounters with scholarly critical self-reflection, even as I taught them to listen better and focus on the process rather than the product of research. Feminist thought and epistemology have also informed the ways that I considered sharing the results of my work: at first I felt paralyzed by my inability to be the voice of the children, and finding my way through that quandary set the stage for my emerging position as scholar-advocate. Later, however, I discovered some techniques for speaking up for the children that rested more comfortably with my feminist concerns. I have come to recognize that despite being quite willing to subject my research and teaching to frequent critique, evaluation, and peer review, I may be too thin-skinned to achieve much stature in the media-driven realm of public scholarship. My nascent excursions into publicity—particularly through the printed media—on behalf of making cities better for young people have resulted in a mix of gratifying nods of approval, frustrating misunderstandings (which are difficult to correct), and discouraging criticism. My personal commitments and passion for this subject may sustain my energy and excitement, but they also open my soul to the devastating realization that many people are not convinced by my evidence, nor do they agree with my arguments. My arguments that youth-centered perspectives would help cities be more "livable" for all sorts of social groups are often met with righteous reactions against loud toddlers, youth gangs, or public breastfeeding (which, of course, is not the point I'm making at all). Perhaps I do not have enough of the politician, salesperson, or preacher in me to have cultivated the required single-minded marketing of the idea. Or perhaps I lack the impervious shell of conviction needed to survive public scrutiny. I find that I am fundamentally unprepared for controversy. Am I, then, a failed public scholar? Early in the ChUG project I held the university's press office at bay because I was still finding my way towards listening to children. I couldn't comfortably present what they had to say when I hadn't even heard it yet. Similarly, I did not want TV cameras accompanying us on our neighborhood field explorations because I felt they would turn our patiently built, delicate sense of trust and respect with the children into a public spectacle over which I had no control. Later in the project I felt more confident that I was fairly representing what the children told and showed me, but I still did not like the loss of control one experiences with the popular press. Not only was I nervous about misrepresenting the children's ideas, I was also leery of critical feedback from the adult public. The passion and heart-felt interest that brought me to the topic of children and cities also made potential criticism sting that much more sharply. My strategy for coping with these fears rested on a self-constructed legitimacy. First, I drew on the power of naming, and started calling myself the "Director" of the Children's Urban Geographies project. This had more authority to the people in the Mayor's office, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and even other academic units than merely being a professor doing research. This process of naming myself and the project was not wholly disingenuous. I was the principal investigator of the grant and the project had between two and twelve students working on it at any given moment over the course of four years. But it was a strategy that did not immediately occur to me. As a feminist researcher working with marginalized groups and with participatory methods, I had always been reluctant to construct hierarchies. Nevertheless I came to see that the very power I usually resisted could also work in my favor and help me gain both legitimacy and the ear of public authorities. So I found that, regardless of whether I choose to invoke it or not, I do have a certain amount of legitimacy and power through my position as a professor at a university. Despite my anti-hegemonic leanings, this power can be usefully employed in the service of speaking up for children and to that end I am quite happy to trot out whatever credentials might sway the policy wonk, developer, journalist, or program director sitting across the table from me. The goal here is not "publicity" so much as a thoughtful engagement with politicians and others who actually make decisions about the neighborhood conditions real children face every day. This, in turn, aided me in broadcasting the project's results. The second method I learned was to create reports and brochures (in consultation with the children) with catchy titles and print them in full color on glossy paper, then send them out with a personalized note on university letterhead. The brochures are backed up with websites in which the report is available as a pdf document, and with slideshows and live links to other resources.1 This strategy helped me to maintain a sense of being "true" to the research but also to share my findings widely. In terms of establishing legitimacy in this realm, a glossy report can be just as—if not more—valuable as a "human interest" clip on the local news station or an op-ed in the daily newspaper. Desktop publishing, cheap ink cartridges, and the internet greatly facilitate this practice, and although I rarely hear back from the recipients of my reports, I know how the public sector works and have at least some faith in the slow, incremental effect of my reports' presence on the desks or shelves of multiple agencies. Thus, at the heart of my participatory research there is also an element of passionate action that goes beyond the potential for chipping away at mundane policies to get at the much bigger issues of the structurally perpetuated deterioration of urban neighborhoods children live in; the intersections of race, class, gender, and youth that create overwhelming situations of oppression; and, ultimately, children's exclusion from "the public" through a series of disempowerments and the pervasive devaluing of children's agency and knowledge. Conveying these messages, however, will continue to be complicated and challenging. The most significant shift for me as a scholar over the course of 15 years has been towards participatory, process-oriented research. This has many strengths but also many hurdles with regard to communicating with the adult public. On one hand, participatory research has made me feel more confident about what I know about children and cities because I have learned to listen and observe much better. On the other hand, by letting go of constantly worrying about the material products or outcomes of the project, I have also lost some of the usual types of results and findings that can be used as tools for public scholarship and advocacy. So, while I cannot provide a sound bite for the media on what percentage of children are scared of people in their neighborhoods (I never interviewed or surveyed my participants in such ways), I can weave together multiple conversations, drawings, journal entries, and photos to develop an action list for ways to improve a city street or park that are solidly based on kids' own ideas and dreams, elicited without reference to adult priorities or worldviews. Thus, although we certainly need "hard" data in many instances, and scholars play important roles in informing society about itself through such data, there is also a need for a careful understanding of marginalized groups' perspectives and knowledge. Only with this understanding can we speak up for them, at least until the time that they too are recognized as a legitimate "public" worthy of a voice. Finally, and coming back to feminist concerns regarding positionality and power, I struggle with the question of heroism. In my most honest moments I know that my passionate wish for children to live in good cities and for their views to be taken seriously is accompanied by a wish that I could be a transformative hero, that something I do or write will be the critical factor in making a widespread, meaningful difference. While I would be glad to see substantive change in the lives of urban kids, would I be that much gladder if it was because of something I did? Yes! I do want to be a hero, but what does that say about my own instrumentalist goals, then? Do I embark on such research for the lines on my CV, possible pay raises, and greater glory? To be frank, I do, which is a not very comfortable admission. But perhaps this is part of the qualifications for public intellectuals, for scholar-advocates—if we care and are passionate enough about issues to make these many efforts, perhaps we need a little hope that we will also serve as heroes for the cause, as leaders of transformation, and as advocates and champions for the silenced and excluded groups in our society. And this is probably not something to be ashamed of. Meghan Cope holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Vassar College, where she first benefited from working with publicly engaged feminist mentors. She completed her MA and PhD in Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she expanded her understanding of cities and knowledge of feminism. Stepping out from the safety net of student-hood, she stumbled her way towards "scholar-advocacy" for a decade at the State University of New York—Buffalo and has recently found a new professional and personal home at the University of Vermont. She continues to struggle to bring children's voices into public decision-making about place in various academic, activist, and personal ways.