Blythe, Stuart. “Composing Activist Research.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research, Hampton Press Inc, 2012. Print. 275-290.
Summary
Stuart Blythe discusses the different issues and elements that sometimes arise when trying to do activist research in regards to writing. He outlines many issues that come along with researching using an activist approach and focuses most specifically (toward the end especially) on the ways in which this kind of research can be difficult when working with publication deadlines. This becomes important to the framework of the article because activist research seems to center around a few different things: 1.) reciprocity and community building; 2.) the need to permission of participants and cultures to accept the research; 3) an exigence that is more than just tenure application based; and 4.) have a clear goal of why you’re doing the work and why it matters. This is because of the ethical considerations that need to occur when working with activist work, especially because of the impacts (negative or otherwise) activist can have on the communities they’re researching.
Quotations
“Many activist researchers seek reciprocal, sustainable, relationships between themselves and the participants with whom they work” (275).
“Relationships that are reciprocal and sustainable are likely to promote greater respect for different ways of knowing while leading to empowerment, and change—perhaps not grand, sweeping changes, but progress nonetheless for researchers and participants” (276).
“Suck projects also may require methodologies that seem unconventional to colleagues. And, as Simmons (2007) writers, such research may require ‘research methodologies that can function in the spaces between the institution and the community and still yield positive and credible results’ (p. 8). The kinds of methods that may yield valid, usable results in a community may not always be the kind that reviewers of journal submissions or promotion and tenure cases expect to see” (279).
“In fact, time may be the key factor during initiation and access. ‘It’s the staying power that builds trust,’ write Flower and Heath (2000, p. 46)” (280).
“All the authors did at least three things: (a) frame the debate they wanted to address, (b) describe a particular research site and their involvement in it, and (c) discuss implications of their work. In framing the debate, the authors define issues relating to a particular topic and show how their work can be used to comment on that discussion” (282).
“Although long-term empirical research on wicked problems may sometimes lead to ‘solutions,’ such work can be important for other reasons. Activist researchers publish article-length works not so much to report results of research—those improvements or changes that many readers may expect—but to comment on issues related to research and social problems” (283).
“Some make a theoretical argument about communication, epistemology, ethics, and ontology. They show how their research complicates (or contradicts) accepted theory on some issue, such as communication across different communities” (286).
Reflections
Side note/Introduction: I’ve been having a really difficult time getting excited about the work that I’m doing in this research project. I can’t seem to land on something concrete that I’d want to do, and so I just keep circling around my interests without having any plans. It’s been frustrating and difficult and I’m just feeling overwhelmed by the constraints of a quarter and the constraints of how much time is left in this quarter to do these things I’m feeling like I can’t quite pinpoint it all. My first time through this article, I was beyond grouchy with how I felt like it wasn’t focusing enough. I printed it out and reread it today and have settled that it talks about exactly the kinds of things I’m interested in and that even though I don’t have any more concrete plans of how I want to do my project, I certainly am back at what interests me… again.
What I really latched onto in this piece is the way that Blythe focuses on the importance of reciprocal relationships and empowerment in the activist work. For me, this relates back to the time I spent teaching Pink Gloves Boxing in my undergrad which in staff meetings we were told to advertise as a “women’s empowerment exercise program” because that’s what it was. This manifested in a few different ways, part of it was the language. I spent my rhetoric and composition class in undergrad writing a paper that examined the ways that the language in sports and exercise culture created dysfunctional silences (Krista Ratcliffe, 2012?) for those who might want to join that community. The inverse of this was pieces (specifically thinking about my experience as a participant and an instructor of Pink Gloves Boxing) where exercise culture used language that created an openness and adhered to the concept of rhetorical listening more. For me—at the time and now—this was because of the empowerment it gave me to be part of this community, and that was the thing, it was a community… community based… community driven… and in that it provided a lot of safety.
Another thing I found really interesting and important in this piece was the way that Blythe demanded the need of identifying the cultural work that you should be doing in activist research. This is something I find really important and have talked to my students about with their own writing. One of the most useful idea development tips I learned in my undergrad was from a literature professor who asked us to figure out the “so what” of our papers and weave it through. I later adopted this into my tutoring suggestions as I read through papers and felt like I wasn’t explicitly aware of why I should care about what the student was writing.
Realistically, the best part of this was on pages 286 and 287 where Blythe outlines how research is messy and how it gets to be oversimplified. This is how I’m feeling right now, and I don’t particularly like it. Though this seems like it should be the annotated bibliography with the most concrete grounding for my project and the additional feedback I should be giving, it certainly is not. I also fear that I have not done a sufficient job examining it for this context, but I have talked about the things that it brought up for me.