Excerpted from Contemporary Vulnerabilities: Reflections on Social Justice Methodologies, edited by Claire Carter, Chelsea Temple Jones, and Caitlin Janzen
Preface
Chelsea Temple Jones, Claire Carter, and Caitlin Janzen
Dear Readers,
We are writing to you, at the opening of this collection, to share our own vulnerabilities and ground what follows in (research) stories (along with many conversations, reflections, and additional moments) that motivated us to draft the call for papers and begin work on bringing vulnerability to the fore—as it has been for us and so many others who engage in social justice research.
In treating this book as an invitation to linger in vulnerability and to dwell upon the vulnerable, we mean to move with you toward a reciprocal reading process that mobilizes your own relationship to vulnerability in whatever way fits your story. We would, therefore, be remiss to propose an activation of your story without reciprocating by sharing our own moments of vulnerability.
As three white settler, queer scholars, variously positioned within the academy and living and working within different treaty territories, our stories are grounded in a range of experiences—graduate student, the ambiguous place of post-defence contract work, attending conferences as a junior academic—echoing the positions embodied, moments encountered, and spaces occupied by many of the contributors to this collection.
Caitlin
Thirteen years ago, when I was working as a research assistant on a project about street sex work in Canada, I had the opportunity to interview a woman who was a new mother to a little baby boy who laid quietly in her arms the entire time we spoke. Something this woman told me continues to haunt me over a decade later: she said that though she did not enjoy sex work and would like to quit it altogether, she did see a social benefit to her work. In her words, “it was almost a protection thing because if we weren’t out there for them to feed off of, you never know what they would do.” She continued to share that if she and other street sex workers were not available for men to enact their violent sexual urges upon, those same men “would rape the innocent.”
My heart broke right there in the room, which is to say, something in me shattered, fragilized in that moment.
It pained me that she believed that this was her role in society. I gave a “good feminist” response. I said: “You don’t think you’re the innocent? But you are.” Abandoning my politicized repertoire and instead entering her linguistic frame, I said, “You shouldn’t have to be the go-between.” By which I meant that this was not her burden to bear.
In the moment of the interaction, I was upset at how patriarchal bio-determinist myths had infiltrated her identity, about how discourses surrounding the insatiability and urgency of the male sex had seemingly determined her position in the world. My outrage at this unjust asymmetry in the experience of being a woman reached its pinnacle when she recounted an experience in which a man walked up to her in a grocery store parking lot, exposed himself, and then headbutted her in broad daylight. “And I thought, you know what, not a single person—I know oodles of people saw it—and not a single person did anything.” This prompted me to ask a follow-up question about the distribution of vulnerability between women as a social group:
Me (researcher): What about women, like middle class–looking women, who chose to do nothing. This is something, like how women turn their backs on other women.”
Her: You know what, because I feel that they get it. They know. They’ve been there and they’re scared. Come on, you can’t tell me that they don’t know. Yeah, I would have to say they’ve been there, done that.
Me: Even if it’s not prostitution?
Her: Even if it’s not prostitution. In some way they’ve been in that type of lifestyle, in the sex trade or not, they’ve been there. They’ve been in survival mode. Because when you’re in survival mode, you only look out for yourself.
Returning to this interaction now, I feel these words travelling along their original fault line, but this time the rupture does not leave us isolated on either side of a subjective scansion the way I initially interpreted it.
Prior to this interview, I was more closely aligned with feminist academic research that considered women who engage in street sex work as agentic but categorically vulnerable; “at risk” of myriad things, from problematic substance use to stigmatization and marginalization, to violence and murder. In this exchange, however, she challenged the notion of a vulnerability that could be ascribed once and for all. For her, there were “the innocent”—girls and women who were even more vulnerable and for whom she felt a sense of protective responsibility. This is relational vulnerability in its most distilled form: She put her body, the same body her little baby depended upon so fully, on the line for other women. For me, this interview tells a story of how vulnerability brings us into relation with one another.
Claire
In the space between defence, graduation, and moving across the country to take up a term position, I did contract work for a research institute in Toronto, affiliated with a hospital. My role was to interview women living in five different communities in southern Ontario as part of research evaluating a program around housing and women’s experiences of intimate partner violence. In the short time I worked on this project, I experienced several critical moments layered with vulnerabilities that gave me significant pause and have offered lessons beyond what any course could teach.
Moment One
I was asked during my interview for the position whether I had experienced any form of intimate partner violence and shared that I had been raped by my boyfriend in high school. I was told that it was important for the research team that people working on the project had some experiential as well as more general knowledge about intimate partner violence. This moment spoke to an effort at relational vulnerability—that the team was trying to foster and work from a space of shared vulnerability between everyone involved. Upon later reflection, after having done some of the interviews, I realized that I had no idea whether any of the women being interviewed knew that I had experienced sexual violence, nor whether the women participating knew that the research team had made this decision and prioritized this in their selection of interviewers. I felt a tension between following the interview guide and engaging in feminist interviewing, which would involve more of an exchange of shared vulnerabilities rather than conventional question (interviewer) and answer (interviewee). I often felt uncomfortable going into women’s homes, aware of how differently we were positioned. I had many moments of feeling that my presence as a middle-class, white settler graduate student and my role as the interviewer further reproduced dynamics of power and inequity that likely caused harm. For example, in moments where women would engage in self-blame about their life choices and situation, I would pause the tape recorder and speak about systemic and structural inequality. My whiteness and economic social capital had not been a part of the reflexive research team conversations in my interview, but undoubtedly, they critically informed the interviews (how I was read/ how women responded and felt) and analysis (of which I was not a part).
…
Moment Three
During the third interview in one day, a woman talked about her most recent experience of intimate partner violence and disclosed that her ex knew where she lived, that he was active with a violent organization in the community, and that she often worried he would come by her house. Sitting in the dark listening, I became afraid—afraid for her and afraid for my own safety. As part of the interview protocol, I would get a check-in call from a designated member of the research team after a set time to debrief and make sure everything was okay. This interview went on longer than most, and I did not receive a check-in call. When it finally ended, I sat in my car quite shaken and called to check in. A friend later asked if there was support available for me (and other interviewers on the project) to debrief what was shared with us; there wasn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be and I was left wondering how to make space for my vulnerability within the traditional conceptions of power dynamics in research. Later, I tried to follow up with a member of the research team after the interviews were done—I wanted to know if the women were doing okay, better/safer than when we had met. I was told there had been no contact or follow-up, which troubled me deeply. These moments reveal ways we are undone by each other, and as Butler states, “if we’re not, we’re missing something” (2004, 19). Overlapping layers of vulnerability—failure of research protocols, of follow-up care, and of relationality have stayed with me and reveal the dissonance between research in practice with the ideals or desired goals of research and what vulnerability can shed light on.
Chelsea
It is a sunny June day with a crisp breeze on the University of British Columbia campus, and my friend, Kim, is sitting beside me. She has ushered me out of a large academic conference because I have lost my breath, and the buildings around me are spinning. “I don’t know—” I gasp, “I don’t know what is happening.” Kim is a calm wonder who is not scared off by madness. She assures me that it’s okay not to know what is happening. It’s okay to take a break from academic networking. Having forged ahead quickly through the publish-or-perish path of academia into a precarious but sought-after post-doctoral position, I don’t believe her. But I cannot figure a way to reverse this panic. I haven’t slept in days. I might throw up. I sink into a chair and stare off into the sky, my mind scaling thoughts like a fast-forwarded film: What will happen if I don’t get the grant I applied for? What if I never get a job, and my community-based research halts, and is rendered ineffective? What if I do get a job, but the reward of employment makes my research seem extractive? I try not to think about the folks with whom I do research—they are the people I have been trying to represent in my conference presentations. Of course, it would be better if they could be here, representing themselves, but there was no funding for the access features that would be required to bring disabled people across the country: personal support workers, sign language interpreters, accessible hotel rooms.
Kim sat with me for over an hour. Later another friend, Fady, would sit with me, too, holding my shaky hand as I tried to steady myself. At one point, I spot Claire across campus, walking into a building. I want to call out, but I cannot move. Still, I feel lucky to have allies nearby and within view in this moment. A few days later I return home and weep in my doctor’s office—I still don’t know what is happening and why it won’t stop. A day later, heavily medicated, I sleep. I finally slow down, for the first time in weeks.
/ /
How do we navigate the tensions between different requirements, protocols, academic spaces, and particular institutions, on the one hand, and our sense of shared vulnerabilities and political commitments to social justice and community engaged ethics on the other? How can we learn to disrupt protocols that seek to categorically determine who is vulnerable in research? How do we speak out against traditions that are unethical, may cause more harm, and/or that encourage detachment? How can we ask for and provide necessary support for ourselves, our collaborators, and our students so that we can sit with the tensions, process what is being offered, and endeavour to be present and grounded? And how can we continually engage in critical reflexivity about our positionality and the impact on people with whom we collaborate in research? The aforementioned moments of shared vulnerability have prompted a long consideration of these questions and have ultimately led to this collection, motivating us to collaborate with other researchers, first to discuss and listen to their moments of vulnerability in research and then to read and learn from their earnest reflections. By sharing their research practices with such humility and openness, the authors in this collection reveal just how generative vulnerability can be.
Notes
1. Ellen Gordon-Bouvier, “Relational Vulnerability: The Legal Status of Cohabiting Carers,” Feminist Legal Studies 27 (2019), 164.
2. Ann Oakley, “Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms,” in Doing Feminist Research, ed. Helen Roberts, 30–62 (London, Routledge, 1981).
3. Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 268–284; Judi Marshall, First Person Action Research: Living Life as Inquiry (London: SAGE Publications, 2016).
4. Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 16.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Gordon-Bouvier, Ellen. “Relational Vulnerability: The Legal Status of Cohabiting Carers.” Feminist Legal Studies 27 (2019).
Marshall, Judi. First Person Action Research: Living Life as Inquiry. London: SAGE Publications, 2016.
Oakley, Ann. “Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms.” In Doing Feminist Research, edited by Helen Roberts, 30–62. London, Routledge, 1981.
Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 268–284.
