Transcript `Which side are you on?` Interviewing Activists about their politics

Inconvenient data and ‘the problem of politics’
ESRC Seminar Series:
Activism, Volunteering and Citizenship
Seminar 5: Biographies of Activism and Social Change
Molly Andrews
Centre for Narrative Research
www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/index.htm
[email protected]
Robert Lynd (1939) Knowledge for What?
Social scientists are “hiding behind their precocious beards of
‘dispassionate research’ and ‘scientific objectivity’”
‘the word academic is synonymous for
‘irrelevant’ Saul Alinsky (1946)
Alinsky described himself as “astounded by all
the horse manure [sociologists] were handing
out about poverty and slums, playing down
the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the
misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in
a slum, I could see through all their
complacent academic jargon to the realities.”
‘We can never avoid taking sides’
It is impossible to do research that is uncontaminated by
personal and political sympathies’
Howard S. Becker (1967),
“Whose side are we on?”
We must always look at the matter from someone’s
point of view. The scientist who proposes to
understand society must… get into the situation
enough to have a perspective on it. And it is likely
that his [sic] perspective will be greatly affected by
whatever positions are taken by any or all of the
other participants in that varied situation. Almost all
the topics that sociologist study, at least those that
have some relation to the real worlds around us, are
seen by society as morality plays and we shall find
ourselves, will-nilly, taking part in those plays on one
side or the other.
Howard S. Becker (1967), “Whose side are we on?”
Key questions which arise
• Who is ‘we’ – forever shifting
• A ‘taken-for-grantedness of categories’
• The peculiar dynamics surrounding research that is
on overtly political issues
• Negotiation of trust
• Audience: when people talk to us, who do they feel is
their audience?
• Our passions/investment in doing certain kinds of
research
• The ‘myth of empowerment’
Getting in the door:
2 cautionary tales
Importance of positioning oneself
• For oneself
• For others
…but that’s just for starters
Political identities:
unexpected similarities and differences
• Implicit notion that things
hang together, ‘the cluster’
approach
• Assuming likeness/contrast
with ourselves is uniform;
we don’t always recognise
deviation when we
encounter it
‘Women become emotional’
They [the rapes at Molesworth Peace Camp] were
made such a lot of. Yes, I thought it was quite, I don't
know quite how far they were genuinely issues. It's
very difficult because the women become very
emotional... This is very cynical of me... I know some
of the very best activists are strong feminists, and it's
very important that we have them... but I do think
they ought not to take over. And some of them go so
very, very far afield, that, well, I don't think being a
woman ever really bothered me. Think of all those
nurses who went to Spain...
The bullet and the ballot box
Marge: I agreed with Stalin, I agreed with Stalin. We’ll never get
socialism through ballot box – do you think we will?
MA: Well, I don’t know…
Marge: I don’t think so, I don’t think we’ll get socialism through
ballot box… ‘he’s killed millions’ they’re only just finding out
that he’s killed a million. At time he never killed a million. It’s
all a tale. Propaganda is very powerful you know, and the
propaganda they’ve against the Soviet Union is very powerful.
And what is left unsaid
“He was a father and that’s what it was, and I loved him,
really…. Some years later in Dresden, he told me … “Son, one
thing you must know, I have become a member of the [Nazi]
party in a very deeply wrong conviction that it would be
useful for my family and what I see now is quite the opposite.
Therefore, never do this” and this is one of the most important
points of my political philosophy… I learned by my father, and
I have seen that he was absolutely right.”
Wolfgang Ullmann,
architect of East German Truth Commission
Taking other points of view seriously
• What to do when we come across something which we find
objectionable?
– Evaluating the purpose of the encounter. Are we trying to:
•
•
•
•
Persuade
Document
Understand
Give voice to
– To engage or not? (And if we do/don’t are we/our research
compromised?)
• Should we only ever interview those people with whose
politics we are in agreement?
My assumption from the beginning, in keeping with my
twenty-five years of research, was that the best way to learn
about Nazi doctors was to talk to them… I never quite got over
the sense of strangeness I experienced at sitting face to face
with men I considered to be on the opposite site of the
victimizing barricade, so to speak. Nor did I cease to feel a
certain embarrassment and shame over my efforts to enter
their psychological world. These feelings could be
compounded when, as in a few cases, I found things to like
about a man, and felt myself engaging his humanity. My
central conflict, then, had to do with my usual sense of the
psychological interview as an essentially friendly procedure,
and my considerably less than friendly feelings towards these
interviewees….psychological probing, rather than moral
confrontation, was required for eliciting the kind of
behavioural and motivational information I sought.
Rober Jay Lifton (1986) The Nazi Doctors
“Colorado Springs is the
proud home of five
military installations.
We are a city that truly
appreciates those that
wear the uniform and
carry the colors.”
“America, the Beautiful, God shed his grace on thee.”
Katherine Lee Bates
MA: what does that mean to
say something is for
America?
Hal: … Let’s give one hour for
America, for what we stand
for. Let’s try to feel good
about ourselves, let’s don’t
everybody be negative about
what we’ve done here. Let’s
try to understand what has
really happened here and
why we did it, and give one
hour for our country and for
the people that fought for
us.
MA: And when you say, sort of ‘to celebrate what we
stand for’ what do we stand for?
Hal: We stand for freedom. Basically, our flag, when we
look at our flag and we had huge flags, I mean 50’ x
50’, hanging off of buildings that people made in that
length of time, in just a short time, and hung it off
their buildings up there, when you look at that flag
what that means to you is freedom. It’s your symbol
freedom. For those protesters who were standing on
the sidewalk over there with all the signs they’d
made up and anti-sayings, the only response we
could give to them is ‘say, look at that flag, that’s
what gives you the right to stand there and do that.
Meanwhile….
The people in Colorado Springs... pelted us with snow balls,
bottles, beer cans, tennis balls, you name it... [they] just
treated us in a really nasty way, [they] spat on us... tried to run
us over, tried to drive up on the median strip where we were
sitting... the whole concept of trying to cause us bodily harm
to signal that they disagreed with what we were doing really
bothered me…. There were a couple of times in which people
with huge American flags tried to hit us over the head with
the actual flag poles and sort of drape the flags over our heads
... there was another time when this pickup truck with some
red necks stopped next to the vigil and they harassed us for a
while and then they ran around us with their flag in a circle a
few times.
Justin, anti-war protester
There was so much intense hostility it was incredible ... you
could just cut it with a knife... after the rally itself was over
[people] lined up and you could see that they wanted to
attack us and the police were there and they were kind of
forming this barricade between us and the people at the
parade... It was one of the most depressing moments I've had
in a long time... they just wanted to sing louder and wave their
flags faster every time they would look at us and spit... but I
think that's patriotism. Where is this diversity, this melting
pot?... Everybody gets melted into one mould, there is nothing
about tolerance for peers.
Mary, anti-war protester
Is it always one way or the other?
Barbel Bohley –
leader of Neus Forum, artist
MA: Can you tell us, retrospectively, what would you do the
same as you did before? What would you do differently?
BB: How, where, when?
MA: Well, in your life.
BB: I would do many things differently, wouldn’t you?...
What I suspect is, honestly, this is neither a
question nor an answer… I suspect somehow,
that the people in the West have not yet
comprehended that the wall is gone. They
have not yet comprehended that half of… yes,
half of the world… yes, that an empire has
collapsed. It has not fully penetrated people’s
awareness what this really means… It should
really be that, likewise, people in the West are
being asked questions.
If you come here and ask me questions for
two-and-a-half hours, that is meaningless. … it
is really I who should put the questions, I
mean somebody from the West, somebody
from the East. It should be more like a
discussion. People from the West come and
want to understand, but they do not want to
understand themselves. They only ask us.
Well, an empire has collapsed… there is
something missing, do you understand what I
mean?
Seeing ourselves from another point of view
“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel's as others see us “
-Robbie Burns
‘One can no longer assume that ‘we’ know who ‘we’ are.
Equally, we can no longer feel so comfortable in knowing who
‘they’ the ‘others’ are either. The queston of partisanship and
alignment is ever more pressing, but its social and ethical
configuration is ore complex. Social and professional
categories are less homogenous and less certain. ...We are no
longer free to think simply in terms of the powerful and the
powerless. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern ‘sides’
while increasingly acceptable to be committed to taking sides
of some sort. The methodological and ethical terrain has
become more fragmented. While it has become more overtly
politicized, the lines of political commitment and affiliation
have become less distinct.
Yazir Henri