Holding On Together

BT: But the rhetoric still remains, doesn't it, in so far as you talk in terms of the three stages of narration, collaboration, location and hope that with the subject you will achieve those goals. You can go through those stages and achieve it. That's the ambition, that's the aspiration and it may or may not happen. What will happen is that ultimately you have responsibility, the research team has the responsibility for selecting, filtering and representing that person's life in the academy, either personally through being invited to talk in New Orleans, or through the written word of an article in the Journal of Education Policy or whatever. So there is no doubt whatsoever that you will benefit as a researcher from this activity. There is some doubt that the life history teller will benefit. That's more dubious.

IG: Absolutely true.

BT: OK, if you accept that, is it morally reprehensible to engage black people in this project, given your own hegemonic position as a white, male, Professor?

IG: For a white project on black people?

BT: Yeah, that's right, I don't want to develop a hierarchy of oppression... Well, maybe I would focus on black people because it is well documented... in the literature.

IG: But what you are asking is a question that seems to me to move beyond blackness.

BT: Yeah.

IG: This is a question about researchers, privileged researchers in this case, dealing with groups at other levels of their hierarchy, normally subordinate positions. I don't know. I don't know how you resolve that..... I've just done a summer school where I was doing life history work with principals and administrators who are, I think you'd admit, a less oppressed group than some of the groups of teachers we've been talking about. By researching upwards you turn some of these issues on their heads, but that isn't the way out of the problem. I mean the issue is if you are researching or conversing with, or however you want to present the relationship, oppressed groups, you are implicated in the differential power structures of society. But frankly I can't see any way that you could suspend that. You can either try and deal with it and seek not to exacerbate it and to confront and to find strategies that resist it in your work as far as you can, but you are still, since you are located in a power structure, you are still implicated. And you are as well as them.