Holding On Together

BT: Well, one of the arguments which goes on in race relations research is, the focus shouldn't be on the black community, the focus should be on racism. How would you respond to that?

IG: No, I think it is a legitimate question, but you can see what I'm saying and it comes back to whether... we exacerbate questions by talking to people and questioning people about things, or whether we help create the flow of dialogue around perilous and problematic issues, and I think a lot of that cannot be prejudged. I think it depends on the way it's done. I don't inevitably always think that asking difficult questions of people, even if they are, as in some case, as is quite rightly the case here, in subordinate positions, that inevitably these invoke some form of colonizing or genome or whatever you want to call it. It depends on the form of the collaboration, the form of the trust, to use your phrase, and the form of the trade... it would be wrong, I think, to say across the board... if you ask difficult questions of people who are differentially located in the power structure (it) inevitably exacerbates their situation. I don't think it does inevitably exacerbate. It might, on the other hand, it might actually help and enhance their understanding of their situation... So it all depends on the nature of the conversation and the dialogue and the form it takes. It might exacerbate or it might enhance.

BT: I guess I'm dubious that it could ever enhance and I'm dubious because I don't believe in the empowering properties of research. I think it's a grandiose and disingenuous conception of social and educational research which has been perpetuated from, reproduced mainly for the benefit of, the social and educational researchers.

IG: I'll buy that... which is why we are now talking about the form of research which certainly has properties behind that - which is certainly attempted to engage in more everyday life kind of conversational forms of research... You may well be right that any form of interaction across such power divides inevitably exacerbates. I would be reluctant to accept that. I think that even if, if we for a moment could conceive of less grandiose forms of research, and I would hope that in some ways this might be one route to that, I would be reluctant to think that conversations across power divides could not enhance understanding because that would mean simply that groups can't talk to each other in any meaningful ways.

BT: Understandings of what? Understandings that they are members of oppressed groups?

IG: Well no. Let's push it a bit more. What about if, for example, let's take teachers and let's for a moment think of them as an oppressed group, which certainly some people would argue they are and certainly they have some properties of an oppressed group. Let's for a minute imagine that the kind of conversations around life history, around studying the teacher's life and work, led teachers to have much more vivid and cognitive maps of the groups of people that influence them, of the groups of people that oppressed them, and the groups of the sort of strategies that might work against those oppressive practices. And if those cognitive maps of resisting oppression or of understanding how oppressions are administered came out of the conversation that we are talking about, I would think that might enhance teachers' understanding of the world in which they live and work. I would think that would be a good thing.