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public acts
Reconstructing the Public Sphere in
Curriculum Studies
Series Editors: William F.Pinar, Maria Morris, and Mary Aswell Doll
PUBLIC ACTS:
DISRUPTIVE READINGS ON MAKING
CURRICULUM PUBLIC
Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco
and Erica R.Meiners, editors
AGAINST COMMON SENSE:

TEACHING AND LEARNING
TOWARD SOCIAL JUSTICE
Kevin Kumashiro
public acts
disruptive readings on making curriculum public
edited by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco

and Erica R.Meiners
Foreword by Suzanne de Castell
RoutledgeFalmer
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 2004 by RoutledgeFalmer 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001
http://www.routledge-ny.com/
Published in Great Britain by RoutledgeFalmer 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE
http://www.routledgefalmer.com/
Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis
or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Public acts: disruptive readings on making curriculum public/ edited by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco
and Erica R.Meiners. p. cm.—(Reconstructing the public sphere in curriculum studies) Includes
bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-203-33704-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-94839-8 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-94840-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Community education—North America. 2. Critical pedagogy—North America.
3. Education—North America—Experimental methods. I. Ibáñez-Carrasco, J.Francisco (Jose
Francisco), 1963– II. Meiners, Erica R. III. Series. LC1036. 8 .N67P83 2004 370.11′5—dc22
2004041869
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword ix
Suzanne de Castell
Introduction Making Knowledge in Public: Overturning an Audience 1

Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco & Erica R.Meiners
Section 1. Disruptive Desires
1. Poverty, Policy, and Research: Toward a Dialogic Investigation 11

Amanda Boggan and Shauna Butterwick
2. Desire and Betrayal in Community-Based Research 26
3. Waadookodaading Indigenous Language Immersion: Personal Reflections 43
on the Gut-Wrenching Start-Up Years
Mary Hermes
4. Trials and Tribulations for Social Justice 55
Adriana E.Espinoza
Section 2. Audiences to Participants
5. Theater Forum at the Urban Odyssey School: A Case Study 69

Michael Sanders
6. Write it, Get it: Motivating Youth Writers 79
Michael Hoechsmann
7. Take Two on Media and Race 89
David Stovall
8. “When I close my classroom door…”: Private Places in Public Spaces 102
Jennifer Jenson
Section 3. Public Acts
9. Working between University and Community: Shifting the Focus, Shifting 122
the Practice
Erica R.Meiners (with engagements from Salome Chasnoff and Roberto
Sanabria)
10. How Research Can Be Made to Mean: Feminist Ethnography at the Limits 139
of Representation
Patti Lather
11. How New Yorkers Said No to War: An Experiment in Message and Action 146
Chris Cuomo
12. Encounters with Memory and Mourning: Public Art as Collective Pedagogy 164
of Reconciliation
Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
Contributor Biographies 189

Index 193
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is possible only with the intellectual labor of many contributors, their time and
energy sequestered from family lives, work, and rush hour madness. Many of you, dear
contributors, are our longtime allies and we thank you for your patience, insightfulness
and for the work you continue to do. We also extend thanks to Routledge and to
Catherine Bernard and Karen Wolny for their support of this work. Also deep thanks to
Bill Pinar for his belief in this project, without which Public Acts would not have been
feasible. Many contributed material and intellectual labor to complete this book: Wajiha
Khan assisted with the index, Britt Permien generated fabulous graphic ideas, Pilar
Riaño-Alcalá offered savy counsel, Shauna Butterwick and Amanda Boggan worked to
inhumane deadlines, Laurie Fuller and John Peirson supported us at home and at work
while working on this project. Finally, our sincere gratitude goes to the teachings of Celia
Haig-Brown and to our dear Suzanne de Castell who has helped us with her wisdom and
spirit here and always. We would also like to extend our thanks to Suzanne Lassandro
and her staff.
Erica
In addition to the above, I thank Francisco and John for a generous, smart and joyful
friendship. At Northeastern Illinois University, I deeply appreciate the ongoing support of
the faculty and staff in the Department of Educational Leadership and Development, the
rich conversations and institutional possibilities provided by the individuals in the
Women’s Studies Program, and the political organizing of the students, faculty and staff
in the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgendered Alliance. Chicago friends are sustaining, including Ken Addison, Tim
Barnett, Salome Chasnoff and the Beyondmedia women, Dave Feiner, Fran Royster, Ann
Russo, Roberto Sanabria, and Laura Wiley. The entire St. Leo’s network moves me in
important ways—thank you for this opportunity. Outside of Chicago, Jodi Jensen, Dick
Higginbotham, the Chicago/NYC/Michigan music festie gals, Joan Ariki Varney, and
Fong Hermes continually reshape my thinking and practices. My mom Denise, cousin
Dirk, and sister Elena, and my nieces Stacia, Heather, and Holly May remind me that
being Canadian counts. As it cannot be mentioned enough, I thank Laurie Fuller for
supporting and challenging me, and for her love.
Francisco
Many people gave me a nurturing space and breathe energy into me so I can do the
strange and selfish work of thinking and writing. Erica Meiners, you came to me with this
idea and, as your essay attests, I fell a bit in love…thank you and Laurie for trusting me.
At home, John R.Peirson has been here all along, a most notable lover for someone as
intense and complicated as I can be…and with a short life expectancy—we still have
more to do/live through. Thanks to my mentor, Suzanne de Castell; I inherited your true
tenacity and vocation for this work, I even inherited your moments of doubt and I still
learn from you all the time; thanks to my towers of strength, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá and
Barry Wright, to my dear friends, Jennifer Jenson, Michael Hoechsmann and his lovely
family, Thomas Kerr and his family, and, last but not least, thanks to the indomitable
Oline Luinenburg. Thanks to my colleagues in community work, all the folks at the
Canadian Working Group on HIV and Rehabilitation (CWGHR), especially the
wonderful Elisse Zack, Stephanie Nixon, and Louis-Marie Gagnon. Thanks to all the
folks at BC Persons With Aids Society, in particular to the adorable Britt Permien.
Thanks to Rick Marchand, Andrew Baker, and Terry Trussler at the Community Based
Research Centre in Vancouver; to Beth Easton in Toronto, Daryn Bond, and Margaret
Ormond in Manitoba for engaging in great work and conversations with me.
FOREWORD
Suzanne de Castell
MOTHER: A photo of my girl, my daughter;

FATHER: This here is our girl, it’s the only keepsake I have;
MOTHER: That we have.
—“Encounters with Memory and Mourning”
Chapter 12, this volume
Public Acts delivers a power-packed, behind-the-scenes look at a diverse collection of

unorthodox educational interventions, from new schools to street classes to community-
based research to traveling memory-museums. Sawy, creative, passionate, and, yes,
angst-ridden—tortured by the failure that is inevitable when you try too much with too
little, when the stakes are too high and shots too long. This motley crew of young
educators, filmmakers, AIDS researchers, ethnographers, counselors, journalists, poverty
activists, and academics blur much more than just genres to demonstrate both the perils
and the promise of working “out of bounds” in public places on public problems,
inventing, always too-hurriedly and “on the fly,” a more truly public discourse with
which to extend education’s reach. In so doing, they entreat, argue, cajole, seduce, and,
yes, deceive, betray, conceal, and entice universities, funding bodies, school
administrators, parents, community members, and even their co-researchers to invent and
support new forms of teaching and learning in places too-long neglected, for people too
often dismissed. Breathless? Agitated. Blurred. Fractured. This is what educational
“multitasking” looks like when it puts down the book and steps outside the classroom to
see how knowledge is otherwise made.
Given to their readers are new programs for throw-away kids, unsupported parents,
communities lost to violence and despair, the sick and addicted, those nominated by
poverty and/or racism to swell the ranks of the educational system’s structurally
preordained “failures.” The authors are the “teachers” who take responsibility for the
creation of those programs, as well as for their myriad failures, frustrations, and
weaknesses. What the reader is meant to hear here is what you can (can’t you?) only read
between the words, between the lines, between and across the speakers. Take a minute:
what is going on in these texts, between them, among and within them? What are you
reading here, and why?
What this congregation of fragments of a larger public praxis asks from its readers is a
more ironic, a more inverting and self-reflecting, a more contradiction-ridden and
complicit, and, yes, of course, a more “critical” reading. This is a collection of
“disruptive readings,” however, that, unlike its more “‘normal” counterparts, does not ask
simply to be read, even to be “listened to.” What these activist educators are asking us for
here is far more than an audience: this is a book that demands of its audience that they
become, themselves, participants in the heart-pounding, perilous, but unashamed
commission of public acts of knowledge creation, taking our desires out of the privacy of
our own homes and making knowledge in public. And it gives us more than a few
graphic illustrations of how to do that.
This book is a little raw? Maybe so. But where is the Martha Stewart of educational
activism?1 How do we do work of this kind? What are our models for “getting it right”?
Nowhere in teacher education courses do we find out (or do we put out) how to do the
work of this very public education, which, in our proper work as dutiful intellectuals, we
have so well and so thoroughly critiqued, whose flaws and weaknesses, whose petty
vengeances, and whose deeply ingrained prejudices we know all too well. Faced with
that, the fact that “No Child Left Behind” should name America’s current educational
agenda, has a kind of churning visceral irony. How, beyond the kind of academic
criticism that seems to leave so much untouched, does public education’s tradition of
discrimination, exclusion, and neglect get remade? Where in educational theory and
research courses do we get a decent look at how things are made to work, how meaning,
significance, and “findings” are, inevitably and unavoidably, “forged,” and against what
odds. And when might we then ever consider the heretical possibility that this partisan
and purpose-driven work of fabrication may just be all right, and what matters, most of
all, is why we do what we do in education’s name? Why is this flawed, made-up, cliff-
hanging work getting attempted and engaged and enacted? What purposes drive
educators to work in unconventional sites, making strange knowledges in such altered
ways?
This collection supplies a number of examples of why, compelling accounts of the
purpose that drives eccentric educational work, each giving a close-up view of the ways
these writers, together with others, have struggled to devise good—where “good” means
much more than just “effective”—ways of making knowledge with and within
communities in ways that they could hope might bring a better world, in whatever grand
or limited way. The range of situations and programs is exemplary: there is work here
about Aboriginal language schools; antipoverty activism; a youth news agency;
subversive genderwork in public schools; public arts and community healing in Medellín,
Colombia; participatory activist research with queer street kids; a high school for women
who are former inmates…this book embraces all of these.
What models, then, has this kind of “public” education to offer to its traditional
counterpart? Three things: rights, agency, and reasons.
These essays take for themselves the right to speak up about systemic problems in the
public sphere, the right to notice how many members of this purported “public” are left
standing on its sidelines. This is nothing new. We already know how “public”
education—alongside of and bolstered by poverty legislation, immigration policy,
housing and health policy, gender politics, racism, and the U.S. justice system—makes
recurrent national patterns of failure and success already readable from income statistics.
Public Acts documents how variously located educators have paid attention to these
structural weaknesses in the public sphere and the ways in which, in a series of very
localized, highly particular sites, they have tried to custom design and build educational
spaces and tools and resources to repair, to strengthen, and to support those sidelined
publics, while knowing that what’s needed is a rebuild, a complete overhaul; that’s
something small-scale, locally driven, and locally based programs will never have the
muscle to accomplish. This, therefore, is also what you will read in this collection: the
moments of grave doubt, a palpable sense of alienation and confused complicity, the
frustration of trying to make education better for too many children—too many people—
left behind, and knowing that this is far larger than any local program can tackle.
And yet…
It’s the “and yet…” that gives this book its hope, its rich promise, its greatest value to
educators both in and out of schools, because this collection opens up to us one example
after another in which the impossible magnitude of the job ahead was not allowed to
extinguish the commitment that only the irrationality of desire could fuel. This book
details the many (and often insidious) ways that desire works in and through social
justice-oriented research and educational work. Describing one such complicit trajectory,
Mike Hoechsmann’s perceptive and optimistic rereading of the coalition of consumer
desire and activism in “Write It, Get It: Motivating Youth Writers” characterizes the
flawed, infected, compromised, and contradictory character of what so much of this book
looks for:
[A] more flexible way of conceiving social change, a more inclusive

emancipatory agenda that does not turf the uninitiated out on their ears for
not living up to prevailing political orthodoxies…. Impure criticism resists
preachy disdain and looks for the sites of possibility in seemingly
contradictory worldviews. (Chapter 6, this volume)
These essays speak of the need to rethink, as well as the strategic and tactical coalitions
we make, the educational tools we use, and the places where public and private collide.
Most of all, they speak about agency and how to advance it, about respect and how we
might learn to feel and to show it, and about reasons why, against steep odds, this
grounded, committed, community-building work is one way—not, maybe, the “right”
way but, maybe, for now, the best way—democratic and publicly reparative educational
work can be done. Because our society has become, let’s politely say, “stopped up”—its
democratic ideals lodged in some painful mid-section, its practitioners confined like
irritants within distended and bloated structures of performance and accountability whose
work is to discard and silence so many among us and leave those of us who are still
moving traumatized into inaction by our own complicity—we are not just unwillingly
with in, we are a willing part of this very system. As the survivors and the perpetrators of
this brutal educational regime, part of whose privilege it is to master the tools of
intellectual criticism with which to see more clearly what education has made of this
democratic public sphere, we pick among our tools for the means to tear down and
rebuild, not quite sure even what or whom we might be looking for.
Maybe it is partly the tools themselves, maybe remorse over what we have done with
them. Consider this view of its subjects, from outside the schoolgrounds:
When I edit a tape I watch them making the same gesture or smile
hundreds of times. I tend to fall in love with them…. That is part of what
prepares me to represent them in the very best way possible. I don’t know
how useful that would be for an academic researcher or an educator. You
are needing to be more critical. Maybe you are needing to hate the
subjects. Maybe the focus needs to change?
—Salome Chasnoff, filmmaker;
Just maybe it does….
I’ve always thought that what Western society lacks is the capacity to
grieve. That’s my perspective, I’m aware it may seem like the product of a
depressed mind.
—Amanda, single mother living in poverty,
student, and anti-poverty activist;
As an erstwhile young academic activist, Tom Walker, very insightfully pointed out,
sometimes for teachers and students in our public school classroom, Monday morning
means Monday mourning. To make a new educational beginning in the middle of an
unjust world, to find the reconciliation we all need in order to move on, to help create a
more engaged and productive public life both within and among our selves, we may well
need to make place and space for mourning and for memory, to sift among the fragments
of places and lives and knowledges and selves that have been broken and cast aside, for
the means to devise what Pilar Riaño-Alcalá in Chapter 12 characterizes as a civic
pedagogy:
In sum, a civic pedagogy needs to work with—not avoid or deny—

suffering and mourning….
…Maybe we need to remember what—and who—our public education has induced us to

forget in order to get on with the business of finding—or even just forging—a better and
more just world. As Monique Wittig long ago advised Les Guérrieres, women who would
be warriors:
But remember, always remember

And failing that, invent.
One last word: as with so much academic work, what drives it and feeds it and gives it
life is invariably far more personal that the text tells, and this book is no exception. I hope
that, even as I hope you see its flaws and foibles, its inner contradictions, doubts, and
barely suppressed treacheries and conceits, you will also find something here to bring
greater clarity and joy to your own heart and your own work. For many of these are
people I know, love, have taught, have worked beside; they are the young ones from
whom we may not only hope for great things, but from whom we can see great things in
the making:
Right
Here.
Note
1. This space is for a reader-composed note on what can go wrong when you make very difficult
things look way, way too easy.
INTRODUCTION MAKING KNOWLEDGE
IN PUBLIC:
Overturning an Audience
Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica R.Meiners
This project began as an attempt to collect articles written by activist educators,

researchers, and artists who are involved in local projects for social change. With flagrant
immodesty, we solicited articles that could report and/or analyze various instances of
public organization and mobilization to offer insights into local practices or “sets of
technologies”—tactics not totally devoid of strategy—used to facilitate social change.
Reading through the work we received, we realized that the articles have captured,
through our somewhat naïve initial longing to report on work that moves across and
between university and community spaces, varied attempts to do the brazen, messy,
flawed, and engaged work to produce public knowledge. The work described in each
chapter struggles, as the title of this series suggests, to reconstruct the public sphere and
to do so by theorizing and/or chronicling the moves undertaken by authors to shift from
the position of spectator, disengaged researcher, or authoritative teacher to an
engagement with social environs as a participant. Our contributors take seriously
sociologist Gordon’s observation that those in privileged economic and social positions
in Western postindustrial nations actively chose a response of indifference or inaction to
the social and economic crises that unfold. “Today, the nation closes it eyes neither
innocently nor without warning… What does it mean for a country to chose blindness as
its national pledge of allegiance.” (Gordon 1997, 207). Rejecting indifference, chapters in
this collection suggest that reconstruction of what constitutes the public sphere also
requires praxis and recalibrations in the knowledge production apparatus.
The chapters in this book insist that acts of making knowledge public (to tell) and
making public knowledge (to be seen) are directly located in everyday practices of social
and political life. As this collection is generated from lived practices, and as these
chapters work to compel individuals (the authors/desired readers) who are situated in
academic and nonacademic positions to give testimony and take ownership for what they
have seen or done, no one is to sit in a theoretical armchair. Authors are, as they strongly
manifest it, close to the work, but sometimes “too close for comfort”: Riaño-Alcalá’s
description and analysis of the potential fruits of the horrid gestures of Colombian
violence in the creation of a “memory-bus” in Medellín; Espinoza’s work to engage a
mainstream Canadian audience to witness the ongoing struggles for social justice in Latin
America; Jenson’s ethnographic feminist-activist recalibration of the “tired” terrain of
gender equity in technology; Hermes’s vibrant labor to sustain the Ojibwe language in
the Ojibwe nation. With tenacity and a sense of urgency, as editors, we desire that this
collection lures (un) suspecting readers to query, What am I doing? What am I thinking?
And why?
Public acts 2
This transdisciplinary scholarship is an implicit and intimate demand for new

audiences to become, as Sanders states in Chapter 5, describing the Forum Theatre
experiences of urban youth, “participant-actors” (inspired in the Brazilian educational
tradition pioneered by Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal). Transgressing perilous borders
between ethnographic and other social scientific writing and journalism and
fiction/nonfiction writing/texts, and then venturing out into experimental textual realms,
the transdisciplinary work of Public Acts charts the authors’ experiences of and desires to
overturn the audience into participants who “do something about it.” Authors chronicle
how the desire to make material improvements in our own lives and/or the lives of those
marginalized leads us to do something about injustice, poverty, illiteracy, and civic
apathy and to turn the difficult trick of seducing “audiences” to be “participants,” which
implies deeper degrees of agency, responsibility, and accountability. Writing about our
tricks provides examples of militant tactics to blur the lines between the traditional
fields/disciplines. These tactics are, if “organic “not spontaneous. Hoechsmann and
Stovall, for example, offer sharp descriptions of empowering youth pedagogical projects
temporarily thriving in the bowels of a capitalistic machine, the mainstream media, that
desires and feeds from the comodification of youth. Their activism crosses disciplinary
borders and compels readers to rebel in a praxis—albeit temporary—theory into action
that is still potential and possible in the “belly of the beast” of capitalism.
The pieces of this collection may preach to the convert, but they simultaneously
document moments where authors move into the streets to preach in-your-face to the
passersby. We gathered this collection of essays for us, for our benefit—okay, we come
clean on this. Then, we thought…what would make others read it, act on it? As the
ethnographic film theorist and activist Jane Gaines points out, “[T]he question of political
action is unanswerable without exact knowledge of the political conditions in the world
of our audience” (2000, 89). Thus, the chapters in this book endeavor to describe and
explain the political conditions for each project, what binds each public act together, and
what makes each act terribly fragmented. Each chapter works to breach, theorize, and live
the gap between the visionary ideas for a grand political and social change and the nitty-
gritty, everyday, often grunt work to achieve those visionary ideas. While some chapters
in this book underline solutions and outcomes, more often the authors work with
uncertainty and anxiety to deploy public practices of resistance/ rebuilding/regeneration.
As this book provides detailed descriptions and brings theory to bear on varied forms of
public pedagogical acts, we suggest that it can offer “living templates”—imperfect
organic curricula/methodology—to inform and inspire tenacious practices in diverse
communities.
Most of the authors in this collection came to maturity in the age of political
correctness in the 1980s and 1990s, and we know that radical action is somewhat vague
and problematic: it can be vain and selfrighteous. Partially, the negotiated public actions
described within this collection could be characterized, as Cvetkovich (2003) describes
the activism of ACT UP, as lived, practical, and responses to trauma that are acted
through, acted up, and acted out. The distinction between mourning and melancholy in
AIDS activism holds for authors in this collection when making any kind of knowledge
public.
Introduction making knowledge in public 3
I refuse the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholy that leads
Dominick LaCapra, for example, to differentiate between “working
through,” the successful resolution of trauma, and “acting out” the
repetition of trauma that does not lead to transformation. Not only does
the distinction often seem tautological—good responses to trauma are
cases of working through, bad ones are cases of acting out—but the verbal
link between “acting out” and ACT UP suggests that activism’s modes of
acting out, especially its performative and expressive functions, are a
crucial resource for responding to trauma. (2003, 434)
Melancholy is the “still life” equivalent of mourning, as melancholy leads us to create

curricula as a series of postcards from the war front about deviancy, risk, suffering, and
other “social ills.” Mourning becomes taking a kind of responsibility for our agency—
immediate or removed—in those ills and working through a committed public response
by acting out on it. Sometimes our public, community-based pedagogical/research
attempts at acting out are successful and/or benign, sometimes they are failures and
harmful; they are rarely neutral. Authors in this collection know that taking steps toward
acting out is problematic—disgusting to some, as mourning and acting out can be such
spectacles—as it involves making knowledge in public. The experiences presented in the
collection evidence that any enactment of radical praxis is anxious, self-conscious,
somewhat cynical and self-serving, and layered with private pain and investments in the
outcome of the act (an academic version of the “money shot”?).
A NOTE ON CONTRIBUTORS
The vision for this book was generated in the problematic every day: how folks in our
own communities struggle to make knowledge in ethical and professional ways, some in
the academic rat race, some in other contexts. These are friends with whom we have
shared rooms of our own: classrooms (as classmates and co-teachers), boardrooms and
church basements (as allies in local and global work for justice), health care institutions
as (in) patient activists and caregivers, and in the nonprofit voluntary sector as volunteers
or frontline workers. These are friends and allies who have demonstrated to us and to
others, as Linda Tuhiwai-Smith states, that they can actually do something: they have a
good heart and they fix generators.
Whose research is it? Who owns its? Whose interests does it serve? Who
will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope?
Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will results be
disseminated? While there are many researchers who handle such
questions with integrity, there are many more who cannot, or who
approach these questions with some cynicism, as if they are a test merely
of political correctness. What may surprise people is that what may appear
as the “right” most desirable answer can still be judged incorrect. These
questions are simply part of a larger set of judgments on criteria that a
researcher cannot prepare for, such as: Is her spirit clear? Does he have a
Public acts 4
good heart? What other baggage are they carrying? Are they useful to us?
Can they fix up our generator? Can they actually do anything? (1999, 11)
Our admission of the blatant conflict of interest that grounds this collection opens us up
to an intriguing critique of inclusion/exclusion. Isn’t it precisely this “asking your
friends” that maintains the reproduction of exclusionary communities in academia? Isn’t
this precisely what we subalterns critique as the “the old boys network” that recycles their
tales in various anthologies? As editors and as contributors, we each struggle with these
tensions surrounding our relationship to our institutional location. Diane Fuss reflects in
her introduction to Inside/Out (1991)—referring here to the creation of “gay studies”—on
the tensions that engulf participation in institutional practices.
The issue is the old stand-off between confrontation and assimilation:

does one compromise oneself by working on the inside, or does one short-
change oneself by holding tenaciously to the outside? Why is
institutionalization overwritten as “bad’ and anti-institutionalization coded
as “good”? Does inhabiting the inside always imply cooptation?… And
does inhabiting the outside always and everywhere guarantee radicality?
(5)
This collection transgresses some of the existing borders and yet we fully acknowledge
that by doing so we set others. By remapping familiar territory, borders become possible
horizons. Authors in Public Acts are insiders to academic discourses and institutions as
professors, graduate students and researchers, and others are outsiders as community-
based researchers, activists, artists, educators, and research subjects. We occupy a
multiplicity of positions (we would not have it any other way), and the conflict of interest
is made public at every turn. We accept this risk of inclusion/exclusion with a belligerent
spirit, much in the same way that people who are visible (or sexual) minorities frequently
inhabit committees, boards of directors, staff rooms, artistic projects, or university
departments, as “tokens.” We aim to cause trouble by being there, by simply occupying
the space. We accept this risk of inclusion/exclusion as we acknowledge and highlight the
work of the contributors in this collection, many of whom have negotiated a complicated
professional path, often alone and “queer” in more ways than one, through academic
studies, poorly funded community-based social and economic justice projects, job
searches or difficult promotions. In an ongoing effort to move physically and
intellectually from the passivity of audiences to an engagement as participants, we
embrace the challenge these ungainly moves create, and work—Public Acts being our
slight of hand—to interrogate others and ourselves.
NOTES ON THE RISKS OF DISRUPTIVE NARRATIVES
Stories have the tendency to insinuate themselves into audiences, inviting intimacy and
familiarity where perhaps none is to be found. The narrative or descriptive apparatus of
some of these articles could, as the literary theorist Sommer suggests (1999), seduce
readers not into action or participation but into collapsing the highly particular projects,
individuals, and communities detailed in this collection into encompassing

generalizations about “humanity.” These representations could teach us to understand
“ourselves” and humanity better. Sommer offers clues to understand the pitfall of
universalization:
The paradox of striving for complete understanding is that it

misunderstands the particularity of its object. To understand is to establish
identity; and this requires conceptualization that generalizes away
otherness. Identifying, therefore, turns out to be a trap at two levels:
empathetic identification violates the other person; and ontological
identification eliminates particularity for the sake of unity. (27)
A reading of endemic “indifference” (Owens 1992) that erases the specificity of the
material lives at stake in each of these chapters is a byproduct we actively seek to disrupt.
So, what will be our response to the violence of indifference?
In our era of information saturation, media uses pain, suffering, and desire to distract
and to create spectacular roadkill out of poverty, deviancy, and violence—the media-
hyped Columbine school murders and the Mathew Shepard bloodshed flicker in our
mind. Representation itself has a capacity to turn many into scared, apathetic, indifferent
audiences (Sontag 2002), hence contributor Cuomo’s deliberate move into a genre she
believes will compel an audience to become a participant and Espinoza’s careful
collaborative community organizing to script avenues for mainstream North Americans
to witness (and accept partial ownership of) the ongoing legacy of the violent
dictatorships in Central and South America. Other authors, in response to this
indifference, also work to reengage in the care for irony that struggles at every step to
upset “the careful work of disattention” to those who are stigmatized (Goffman 1963,
41). Our authors use this pain, suffering, and desire to generate hope, to remember. These
authors engage with the questions posed by Linda Tuhiwai-Smith; they offer to fix our
generators and work to “fix” our imagination, to shape a material practice—what we are
able to do to counteract the violence of indifference: public art, community tribunals,
youth newspapers, community-based research, etc. Chapters demonstrate the use of the
raw material of pain and violence to do research and teaching—knowledge in public—
that works to make a material difference in our lives and the lives of others.
Yet another philosophical question mobilizes us, because, if we admit that we
perilously circumvent the absolute scientific notion of primum non nocere, what are we
left with to protect others and protect ourselves? What is the ethic that we adhere to—
maybe the postmodern research ethics of “harm reduction”? Is this different from the
ethics of universities and other public institutions now deeply concerned with legal
liability? Who are we protecting, really? The Odgen case puts this issue in relief. “Ogden,
a former criminology graduate student, had sought financial support for his defence of the
issue of confidentiality, related to his research on euthanasia and assisted-suicide in
persons with AIDS, before a coroner’s court in 1994. During the proceedings, Ogden
refused to provide information, citing academic freedom and privilege.” (SFU New, July
1988) The university negelected to support this graduate student as its interest initially
lined up with legal liability first, and second with freedom of academic thought. The
ways in which social scientific research on humans is conducted in Canada was greatly
Public acts 6
impacted by this David and Goliath epic—illustrating that there is a great risk in
narratives that disrupt the violence of indifference. The writing in Public Acts suggests
several directions that this new ethic of making knowledge might travel. If indeed
primum non nocere does not necessarily apply, at least not in the way it used to, in the
ways we were trained to believe and to behave, if we indeed admit that research subjects,
students, participants, teachers, contributors, and readers will get hurt no matter what we
do (unless we don’t do it, and that is not an option any longer), our most ethical option is
to cause the least possible damage by telling the “best” possible story there is to tell about
making (public) knowledge (in) public. The varying textual strategies (narrative, theory,
theater) offered by contributors signify representational (and epistemic) tensions
surrounding how this story should be crafted (often to move this endemic indifference).
In crafting this collection, we refused the option to pump out our own “soft-core”
nonintimidating brand of redemptive stories about pedagogy and research. While neatly
sewn educational stories may contribute to the creation of more traditional “audiences,”
we argue that redemptive stories are a form of benign indifference: they do no harm
because the representation does nothing at all. Thus, the narratives contained in Public
Acts strive to refuse the airbrush of indifference and universality, characteristic of
neoliberalism and prevalent in post-positivist responses to social research. For example,
Hermes’s “gut-wrenching” narrative of the complicated work to keep an indigenous
language movement alive is not a project that can be easily replicated, and the pain that
echoes in the story actively resists generalizations or the easy closure that so often
accompanies narrative.
Our insistence on the peripheral and gritty contents of this book stems from
dissatisfaction (some may say bitterness) with the optimistic present where what is
disabled, queer, immoral, and not white has been dealt at best with polite indifference, at
least in mainstream education. We question the methods and desires of the production of
new knowledges that scaffold and coat this indifference and simultaneously worry that
we also risk the production of this indifference through our reproduction of “mainstream”
organizational vices—we invite our friends—but we have worked to not offer them the
security of the theoretical armchair. This betrayal leads our discussion on a “new
ethics”—if such a thing could exist. This ethics underlines the importance of enacting a
clear resistance to redemptive theories and narratives (those that do no harm because they
do nothing at all)—even as/if we fail. If we die, we want to be buried vertically, head
first. And these ways of dying (perhaps a form of partly juvenile bungee jumping? partly
sanctimonious martyrdom?) bring us to the last theoretical inquiry in our introduction, the
question of desire. Desire is tremendous and chaotic, it makes one speak in tongues that
are not one’s own, it places us and others at risk while it promises valor. The worst we
can do for others, we offer, is not to engage with desire in making public our knowledge:
do not choose silence.
A NOTE ON DESIRE
To complicate matters and to document how complicated matters of public

pedagogy/research are, our readers—you—will be enticed to be reacquainted with a bent
that often receives polite lip service in the field of education: desire. This book
documents desire as the motivation to read, write, and converse our lived political,
professional, and personal experience: the desire to “perform” acts of pedagogy and
research—making knowledge public—that are often rabidly political and personal. Why
do we get into activism or community-based partnerships? The desire for a collective
healing and movement of political and social accountability moves Espinoza out of the
world of therapeutic discourse into active agency in the political sphere; the desire for an
“ethical” representation of the experience of activism and pain that surrounded 9/11/2001
moves Cuomo to experiment with a performative discourse that can capture affect and
multiplicity—not traditional Anglo-American philosophy.
If there is no money or glory, just trouble, only ethical quicksand in making
knowledge public these days—then why? Why engage with “it” at all? Why risk
academic suicide, or worse, no academic “act” at all? Following Sandoval’s work in
Methodology of the Oppressed, in which she identifies desire as a/the meaningful force
behind “revolutionary social change” (“‘hope’ and ‘faith’ in the potential goodness of
some promised land”) (2000, 140), Ibáñez-Carrasco builds on this definition to explain
how—to paraphrase Foucault’s notion of desire—one can and must deploy desire to
overturn missionary positions. This collection invites you, dear reader, to grapple with
some prickly questions: what might this revolutionary desire resemble? How might this
revolutionary desire be instigated, theorized, or enacted? What shapes does this
revolutionary and fluid desire adopt? And, most important, what is left for the local
communities to use/remember? This collection engages this desire through the
representation of a series of dirty little acts, sometimes self-indulgent, often earnest, but
always necessary.
In closing, our chapters leave stains that are dead giveaways of our sweet and sour
handlings to make knowledge public. We argue that domestic and localized tactics are
sexier and more enticing to the eyes, the palate, and the energy of community-based
pegagogues, activists, students and researchers. However, we are also aware that any
reversal of missionary positions and any mention of desire involves taking the risk of not
being taken…taken seriously, that is, or not even be looked at/seen (academic suicide?).
Hence, we had vigorous discussions regarding the inclusion of “unorthodox” material in
this collection. Why can’t professors write like professors? Why do they want to be
artists, playwrights, or activists? Genres, formats, and languages are being subverted,
Mikhail Bakhtin’s prophecy of heteroglossia is realized, and even we have a hard time
dealing.
THE SECTIONS
The first section of the collection, Disruptive Desires, speculates openly about the
motivations that move educators, community leaders, researchers, and artists to meet in
crummy rooms or in boardrooms and strategize curricula to move groups of individuals
for joint concerns or commonly defined interests and investments. These are rooms
where the beautiful, bold, and ugly of interests meet and curricula is pieced together,
divvied up in tasks to be attempted later, and often classified by other names such as
“action plans” or “protocols.” Curricula and research exist in hybrid forms and under
other guises. Chapters in this section engage the desires that lead these authors into
Public acts 8
research, projects, and activism and the negotiated relationships, and the deep betrayals,
that can emerge from this work. As Boggan and Butterwick, Ibáñez-Carrasco, Hermes,
and Espinoza outline in the chapters that open this collection, activist pedagogical and
research work engages with risk and betrayal.
Audiences to Participants, the second section, considers the shifting consequences as
authors move from being students and researchers to actors with emotional and political
investments in whatever public work they pursue. The creation of an audience is not a
natural occurrence; it is a painstaking collaboration between cultural workers (teachers,
ethnographers, artists, popular educators) and fragmented audiences. What texts are
produced from the work we do? Can the story of falling prey to desires in one’s field be
told in ways other than the sensationalistic or smarmy? (Fallen—frequently female—
teachers such as Mary Kay Letourneau to easily become demonized and sanctioned
media products where the stories told about their illicit acts and desires insist upon a kind
of normalcy that actively works to foreclose other readings.) How can we tell stories
about curricular and research knowledge public—the relationships with volunteers and
graduate students can be easily demonized and sanctioned. How can we tell stories about
radical pedagogical and investigative work without being stereotyped as deviants? When
and how do deviants get to tell stories? What is the place of deviant tales in curricular and
research knowledge? In the closet? In this collection, none of us, the contributors, will
make the tabloid press headlines but we are not exempt of the risks of appearing nagging,
idealistic, soft, populist, unconventional, in other words, “deviants”. What “new”
conceptions of old practices evolve out of these choices of audiences, writing practices,
and alliances?
Sanders starts the section squarely locating the desire for participation in his
description of an urban youth theater project that works to transform the lives of youth.
Hoechsmann opens temporarily fraught possibilities for imagining “new” physical
audiences for the pressing political and social issues of youth. In furtive contrast,
Jenson’s piece tells us about the need to generate new audiences and new queries for the
“old” problem of gender equity in education as she charts her own ambiguities passing
between practices as feminist activist, a graduate student, and an ethnographer. Indeed,
new audiences and participants emerge as they are engaged (or not) in the dramatic
curricular/methodological scenarios presented to them. This section aims to contribute to
the creation of the tenacious engagement of participants, not in one spectacular sweep but
through fragile steps.
The third section, Public Acts, offers descriptions of projects/ actions/organizations
that (dramatically) go public. The chapters by Meiners, Lather, Cuomo, and Riaño-Alcalá
chronicle the histories and the locations that shape the origins and the social, group, and
individual dynamics that animate the public acts. The projects described in this section
are as textured as the topography they attempt to chart. Meiners charts the need for a shift
in “research” through a layered chronicle of her work in and with two community-based
projects that seek to publicly address issues and people in the prison industrial complex.
Both Lather and Cuomo explore “experimental” feminist ethnographic practices: to
represent the lives and agency of HIV-positive women, and to represent the layered
multiplicity of a movement for peace and justice. With seemingly oppositional discursive
acts—an engagement within theoretical terrain and a move into a performative discursive
field—Lather and Cuomo offer (at least) two tactical strategies to create public acts that
have the possibility to ignite social and political change. We juxtapose these differing
methodological moves with intent, to illustrate the range of “academic” responses
generated from a desire for radical praxis. This section is fiercely closed by Riaño-
Alcalá’s anthropological report of a civic literacy and artistic work in one of the toughest
barrios of Medellín, Colombia, that moved people from witnessing and perpetrating
violence to an ethical engagement with memory. Chapters surely do not entice other
pedagogues and researchers to mimic the tactics and strategies offered step by imperfect
step, if they dare to try; rather, each author offers a description of public acts, that
transgress the physical, disciplinary, and political boundaries of the university.
REFERENCES
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. Legacies of trauma, legacies of ACTIVISM: ACT UP’s lesbians. In Loss,
edited by D.Eng and D.Kazanjian. Los Angeles: California University Press.
Fuss, Diane. 1991. Inside/out: Lesbian theories, gay theories. New York: Routledge.
Gaines, Jane. 2000. Political mimesis. In Collecting visible evidence, edited by J.Gaines and
M.Renon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. New York: Simon &
Schuster.
Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Owens, Craig. 1992. Beyond recognition: Representation, power, and culture, edited by Scott
Bryson et al. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Sommer, Doris. 1999. Proceed with caution when engaged by minority writing in the Americas.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
SFU News, July 1998. http://www.%20sfu.ca/mediapr/sfnews/1998/July2/ogden.html
Sontag, Susan. 2002. Looking at war. The New Yorker (December 9).
Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples.
London & New York: Zed Books.
Section 1
Disruptive desires
1
POVERTY, POLICY, AND RESEARCH
Toward a Dialogic Investigation
Amanda Boggan and Shauna Butterwick
We can disturb the taken-for-granted notion that poor

subjects are constituted of despair and silence and an
impossible site for radical knowledge by making room for
more detailed testimonies and more resistant ideologies….
[I]nstead of throwing up our hands and concluding that the
subaltern cannot speak, cultural critics should allow the
possibility that poor subjects have special knowledge and
can and do speak as cultural subjects in ways that
academic criticism has somehow been overlooking or
devaluing. (Rimstead 2001, 4)
Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes
action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever
the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that
dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical
conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive
reality. But to substitute monologue, slogans, and
communiques for dialogue is to attempt to liberate the
oppressed with the instruments of domestication.
Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their
reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat
them as objects which must be saved from a burning
building; it is to lead them to the populist pitfall and
transform them into masses which can be manipulated.
(Freire 2000, 63)
Dialogue is not something we do or use; it is a relation
that we enter into—we can be caught up in it and
sometimes carried away by it. Considering dialogue as a
kind of relation (with one or more other people)
emphasizes the aspects of dialogue that are beyond us, that
we discover, that we are changed by…. The creation and
maintenance of a dialogical relation with others involve
forming emotional bonds, such as respect, trust, and
concern; as well as the expression of character traits or
virtues, such as patience, the ability to listen, a tolerance
Public acts 12
for disagreement, and so on. (Nicholas Burbules 1993, p.

xii)
Resistance, at root, must mean more than resistance
against war. It is a resistance against all kinds of things
that are like war. And there are so many things like that in
modern life that make you lose yourself. So perhaps,
resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied,
assaulted and destroyed by the system. The purpose of
resistance here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order
to be able to see clearly…. I think that communities of
resistance should be places where people can return to
themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that
they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.
(Nhat Hanh 1978, 122)
If you have come to help me you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up
with mine, then let us work together. (Source unknown)
It’s not the noise that comes out of the hole in your head
that counts, it’s the action you do with your ass that counts.
(Amanda Boggan)
INTRODUCTION
Rimstead, Freire, Burbules, and Nhat Hanh speak of the need for testimony by poor
subjects, of the need for dialogue and relationality, and of spaces of resistance as sites
where wholeness can be achieved. Their words and calls for research, which are
grounded in a dialogic process, have helped to frame an action-oriented research
partnership that we have worked on together, beginning in 1998. We met at a focus group
organized by an anti-poverty group working in collaboration with Shauna, who, at the
time, was preparing a report for a joint federal provincial committee on effective welfare-
to-work programs. Missing from the materials that Shauna had been asked to review were
the perspectives of single mothers on welfare. Amanda was one of the twelve women at
that meeting. She contacted Shauna later and asked if she was interested in getting
involved with some anti-poverty activities that Amanda was spearheading in her
community.
Out of this initial connection grew the idea of an action-oriented research project.
Shauna would participate in meetings, bring resources to the group, and document the
learning processes taking place. One of the projects undertaken by the group was the
development of a fair-trade cooperative venture that would be economically viable and
grounded in solidarity with other poor women. To this partnership Shauna brought a
desire for her academic research to make a difference, informed by principles of
community-based, feminist, action-oriented research where the goal is to democratize
policy making and the process of knowledge creation. Shauna hoped this project could
help to fill these gaps. Amanda was looking for support, resources, and respect. As an
anti-poverty activist, she had too many experiences where charity and the middleclass
Poverty, policy, and research 13
bias of individuals and organizations were the modus operandi. In these encounters, she
was often the only poor person in the room. Her ideas were misinterpreted and often
dismissed.
On a few occasions we presented the results of the research at academic conferences
and workshops. These experiences were challenging, rewarding, and disturbing. These
encounters illustrated how transgressive it is to have women on low incomes speak of
their perspective on welfare reform and what matters to them—often very different from
the dominant discourse that makes certain claims about what women need. These
moments highlighted for both of us our different locations within a hierarchy of privilege
and oppression—oh, what a difference class makes! The asymmetry of these encounters
was significant, creating great risk for Amanda. Audiences often saw Amanda as
“representing” poor women; she was often the only individual on low income in the
room, telling her story, while others, academics and researchers from other agencies,
were the audience. Few, if any, in the audience had had experiences where they would be
speaking of their lives as middle- and upper-class individuals to a group on low income.
Amanda was frequently not heard, her story translated by those present into something
that would fit their framework.
What follows is a conversation between the two of us, reconstructed from our email
exchanges and our memories of certain encounters. By structuring this chapter as a
conversation, we hope to create a text that in some ways resembles our commitment to
dialogue and the challenges and rewards of creating research that moves toward
relationships based on solidarity.
THE CONFERENCE PAPER
Shauna:
Hi Amanda, I’m wondering if you’d be interested in working with me on a proposal and
paper for a conference that would happen in March 2001 here at UBC. I’ve started to
write a proposal that would outline the paper and presentation we might give. I appreciate
how this might not be a priority, given all the things you’re doing right now, but it would
be great to start writing something together. I’m happy to do the work on this and for you
to participate in whatever way works the best for you. I’ve started to map a proposal for a
possible paper. I’m wondering what you think of this idea and what I’ve written. Your
feedback is very much welcomed. Here’s the proposal…
This paper will outline some of the key lessons learned from an action
research project that has been developing since the spring of 1998. The
Surrey Collective is a group of low-income women, mostly single mothers
living in Surrey (a large suburban area in greater Vancouver, B.C.), who
have been building a non-profit organization that they hope will provide
some economic benefit as well as educate those who use the services
about the lived realities of the women involved and about fair-trade
practices. The focus of this paper will be on lessons learned about the
provincial policy context within which these women must negotiate their
way towards a better future. Examining policy from the perspective of
Public acts 14
those who are marginalized from decision-making processes that directly

impact their daily lives contributes to better understanding of assumptions
and outcomes of policy. This research project directly challenges several
assumptions that inform current welfare reform: that welfare is a
disincentive to work and that those on income assistance are not working
(and therefore undeserving of certain interventions). The focus of
activities has been the development of an Internet-based fair-trade non-
profit organization, working with women’s cooperatives in Central and
Latin America. The goal is to sell the goods that the women’s
cooperatives produce and to build relations of economic solidarity
between poor women living in “the north” and those living in “the south.”
This project has proved to be a significant learning experience across
several fronts: learning the skills needed to use the technology, learning
about the impacts of local and global policy on poor women, learning
about fair-trade practices, learning how to use the Internet as a site of anti-
poverty activism, learning to build a democratic collective, and learning
how to create respectful and mutually beneficial relations between poor
women and academic researchers. This study also illuminates the
significance of hope as a foundation for learning one’s way out of poverty
and as a lens through which to examine policy changes and training
programs.
Amanda:
I’m not sure how much learning about realities is taking place in this project. So far all of
the people involved have come to the project understanding their own poverty and the
barriers that prevent them from overcoming poverty in their individual and daily lives.
I’ve found it very difficult to talk with the people in the project about other people’s
poverty and the ways that we are all exploited economically in globalization and the
current welfare policies. In fact, I’ve encountered hostility in trying to talk about trade
issues, economic exploitation, or classism. The rhetoric of globalization does not seem
useful in any practical way for poor women. The people in the project have been willing
to talk about their own individual struggles in terms of their daily lives. Any other kind of
talk is deeply distrusted and seen as threatening and… somehow…an act of domination
on my part. This disinterest or distrust is not just directed toward me and my particular
way of speaking about these issues; it seems to be also directed toward anyone who can
speak about poverty issues in what I would call ideologically elitist terms.
I’ve come to think that this project needs to be about economic survival and that the
rhetoric is something not useful to the people in the group. This is a bit of a downer for
me because I have spent a fair bit of time learning to talk about poverty issues in an
eloquent and…what I hope is…an impressive style. The project has only succeeded so far
insofar as it has been about economic practicalities and investigating ways that we hope
fair trade can serve the poor North and South. And economically the project has failed so
far. So I would have to say that the project’s ability to “educate those who use the
services about the lived realities of the women involved and about fair-trade” is not
entirely true. They simply don’t want this education because these people don’t see it as
useful in this project, and anyone who can articulate poverty issues in academically
educated terms is seen as threatening and domineering and …maybe…exploitive? Who

needs it?
The fair-trade project has not been successful to date. So far we haven’t been able to
get any of the projects with the women in the South off the ground. We’re still hoping
and searching for a way to transcend the free-trade market so that it can work for us.
We’re in the midst of negotiations, and it’s a very, very slow process of communication
that doesn’t offer much hope for being able to do economically viable transactions. The
reality with this group in Surrey is that we have limited financial resources. We’re in the
process of doing a business plan on this structure, but it’s hard to complete this work
because each of us is totally overwhelmed by the current income assistance policies that
make daily survival so exhausting and difficult for the group here. There isn’t much time
left in a day after securing basic survival necessities. The learning that has gone on, for
me, is important but has existed only insofar as it relates to learning more about the
barriers governments set up against our economic survival and not necessarily to
economically just ways to get out of poverty. We had hoped that fair-trade relationships
were a means available for the northern and southern groups to enter the market. We had
read that fair-trade relationships were a niche where small producers and marketers can
produce and sell goods. But the project is not viable.
I wouldn’t even go so far to say that this group has been about learning to build a
democratic structure. Although that sounds nice in theory, doesn’t it? What I’ve learned
is that there is no way to create a democratic structure in this society as it now exists
under globalization. These are hard words for a hard reality. I don’t know if there has
ever been democracy for poor people. I don’t have the intelligence or the information to
know whether democracy has ever existed within the economic status of the people in the
group. I have learned that in each and every moment the group struggles with issues of
power and dominance and tries to come to a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the
group. This happens within an environment where the poor people in the group have
differing personal and economic resources and the economic system outside rhetorically
encourages us to compete with one another or with outside forces even as we are pushed
together by reality into this group (nonprofit) structure where we hope to gain some
economic benefits. In this struggle, there are lots of pitfalls and hard places. It’s an
ongoing struggle that never seems to achieve an end in that which can be called “a
democratic structure.” Sometimes there is very little democracy operating in the group.
Sometimes it takes some unorthodox effort to get to that place where democracy is
happening. In terms of voting, I would say that our process has been not one of voting but
rather of stomach-churning negotiation.
In terms of respectful and mutually beneficial relationships between the group and
academic researchers—I think that we’re operating respectfully and mutually beneficially
on the level that you’ve been able to provide resources to the group that we thought the
project needed and in return we allowed you to study our project.
I think that, at this point in your proposal, you’re not speaking about a subject that I
can discuss without being dishonest. I either have to be dishonest here or take the other
option of disturbing your concepts of democracy. Only by disturbing your concepts can
we have a real dialogue; otherwise it will all be pretend. Let’s cut through the bullshit
here. This discussion is meant to inform those who have some ability to inform or reform
welfare policies. I have no problem in being dishonest and engaging in a discussion that
Public acts 16
implies that talking about welfare policy can result in changes to welfare policy that
might benefit the poor. I do that under the following conditions: (1) I expect to be paid to
talk about welfare policy, and (2) I want the opportunity to impress a roomful of people
who can then give resources to me or our project in return for my participating in a
discussion of welfare policy. In each of these scenarios, I am “pretending” that a
discussion of welfare policy is going to change welfare policy to be more economically
just, and this pretence will take place in return for whatever economic resources could be
or have been offered in the past to me or my group as a payment for the pretence. It feels
like selling my ass.
I also don’t understand what you mean by “hope as a foundation for learning one’s
way out of poverty.” I heard once in a movie the line, “Hope is a very dangerous thing.” I
think that productive actions against poverty can only come with the courage to be fully
aware of our own desperation and suffering in capitalism. I can’t afford to live in “la la
land.” I’ve always thought that what Western society lacks is the capacity to grieve.
That’s my perspective, I’m aware it may seem like the product of a depressed mind.
OUR LOCATIONS
The previous email exchange was one that occurred after we had been working together
for a couple of years. It relates to a specific moment in the project where we were talking
through the possibilities of presenting a paper together at an academic conference. It
represents, we think, the character of our conversations where we struggled to be real
with each other and also to build our relationship that has since become a friendship that
we hope will last for a long time. The reader can likely hear how our bodies and our
institutional and geographic locations shape our discourse. We now turn to another
exchange we wrote in an attempt to further “come clean” about our intentions, locations,
and motivations.
Shauna:
I speak as someone inside the university, where I attempt to bring a feminist activist
orientation to my study of adult-education policy and programs. My ancestry is a mix of
Scottish and English [like Amanda’s]. I am middle aged and middle class. I live in East
Vancouver. I have never experienced poverty. I have learned so much from this
relationship with you, Amanda. This has also been a kind of on-the-job learning process
for me as well. We are living in a society where we are becoming increasingly isolated
from each other. If it were not for this project, our paths would probably have never
crossed. The welfare system and the consumer culture means that our everyday lives are
worlds apart. How can we bridge such huge divides? Perhaps through community-based
research, where we make a commitment to working in dialogue with others.
This project with you, Amanda, and the other women in the Surrey Collective has
highlighted the huge distance between the academy and communities on low income that
I have tried to bridge by providing resources. The group had a variety of ideas about how
I could be helpful to them, and over the last three years I have occupied a number of roles
within the group, which has had a dynamic and fluid membership. I have used research
funds to purchase computers and Internet access and to provide short-term training to
help the members use these tools. I have also bought books and supplies and shared with
them much of the academic literature I have used in my teaching and research that
explores welfare policy reform, participatory action research, and community
development. I helped the group make links with various resource people, and have
looked for sources of funding for them. I have traveled with them on field trips to visit
other poor women’s collectives, and I have sold gift baskets the group made to my
academic colleagues to raise funds to support further initiatives of the group. The two of
us have made presentations together on two occasions—at a welfare policy workshop and
at the conference we mentioned in the previous section. Amanda, you also spoke to my
graduate class about using the Internet as a site of anti-poverty and anti-globalization
organizing.
As someone who has access to funding, who knows the academic territory, I have also
been conscious of creating ways for the group to develop its own capacity to conduct
research and of being as transparent as possible with my interests and the imperatives I
face in the academy in relation to conducting research and publishing. I must admit to
some hesitation about suggesting we present together at an academic conference; I don’t
want Amanda to be the “token poor person.” When we both went to the alternative-to-
welfare-policy workshop, your presentation was one of the most powerful. I could see
that it had shifted the room and had affected those attending the workshop. But then I
watched in dismay as several researchers at the workshop approached you, asking if you
would be interested in being interviewed for their research. In a microsecond you moved
from being a presenter like everyone else at that meeting, to being an object of research. I
am cognizant of the tremendous push within traditional scholarship that will construct
you as research subject/object rather than co-investigator.
I would like to create some space for stories that explore the meaning of poverty and
women learning their way out of poverty from the perspective of the women themselves.
Research and accounts written about women’s experiences within formal programs—
such as skills training, job search, or entrepreneurship education—sometimes include
women’s perpsectives. However, little research and documentation exist about the
significant amount of learning that takes place outside of more formalized welfare-to-
work programs. What this has identified for me is the self-/group-directed learning
initiatives that you and others—well, actually, mainly you—have undertaken. You seized
the opportunity, once you got on the Internet, to search out an amazing array of
information, to attempt to make connections with fair-trade organizations, to learn the
rules of import and export business, to link with women’s cooperatives in Central and
South America.
What strikes me is how the current welfare-to-work process and programs limit your
choices and predetermine your needs, rather than supporting your learning process on
your own terms. Can this research help to change policy so that it supports your
entrepreneurial and self-directed spirit? Working with you has helped me to see how
powerful such an approach could be if it were based on principles of adult education
where the idea is to recognize individuals as knowledgeable agents, capable of
determining their own learning needs, on their own terms. Learning how to learn has
been acknowledged as a key aspect of survival in the restructuring of work and the
economy, but it seems that current policy undermines this.
Public acts 18
Amanda:
I speak as an anti-poverty activist, a single mother with two preschool children, as
someone on the receiving end of welfare- and training-policy decisions who has never
had a voice at the policy-making table. I live in Surrey, and it’s important to understand
how that geographic location is significant to my experiences. There are lots of jokes
about Surrey. It’s not exactly considered the most desirable location to live, quite the
contrary. It’s a sprawling rural area overshadowed by Wal-Mart and those megastores
able to compete with Walmart. The most striking visible landmarks in this area are
parking lots and shopping malls. It’s a culture, in my opinion, where people’s social
success is often measured by their ability to participate in consumerism, even though they
live on the economic margins. The only thing people in my community understand as a
way of making political change is to go out and picket and protest against those who are
more disadvantaged or to volunteer with privatized agencies such as nonprofits who are
contracted to manage people who are even poorer and more oppressed than they are. This
is the typical “community activism” where I live.
I think it’s important to identify that this is where I live so that people understand
we’re not talking about a place where class war or any kind of revolution is even
remotely known as a phenomenon or thought about as a viable alternative. Any overt
political actions to try to make change here are limited. It’s dead here in terms of any big
community “leftist” activity for the simple reason that everyone is working their butts off
each day and no one has time. Where we live makes a difference to our politics.
Geography matters.
Speaking of places making a difference, let’s talk about our joint presentation. As I
have told you, I don’t think my participation at the conference made any difference to
welfare policy. You asked me what I wanted from this presentation, and I said money.
You then said that was unlikely because the researchers and other participants are not in a
position to give funding. My second hope was that I could change some participants’
ideas about how research is conducted, particularly research that investigates welfare
reform and the experiences of poor women. I want to cut through the bullshit. It’s ironic
that, right now, I’ve never been worth so much in my life (as a research “subject”), and
I’ve never been so poor.
I have been trying for several years, as you are well aware, with limited success to
create a cooperative venture that will bring in income. I wanted to get off welfare, but my
experiences with what programs are availabe to me, given my life circumstances, were
not useful—actually they are destructive. I could have told lots of stories about the
barriers I face just to survive and take care of my children. When you are poor in a rich
country, the everyday activities that you undertake to take care of yourself and your
family become major hassles, and anything effective is criminalized. Such struggles are
not visible to those living outside the welfare system. I could tell stories about the barriers
constructed because I am poor—stories about social housing, dealing with landlords,
getting new eye glasses, finding a preschool for my kids, using public transportation,
getting dental and medical care, finding child care, encountering post-secondary
educational institutions, buying groceries, and making meals. But why write about the
miserable details of my life—it would be just too depressing for me to recount. And why
should I reveal these details? Whose life is under surveillance here. Certainly not those
who were attending the conference.
If I were in another location, my efforts to care for myself and my children would be
considered as entrepreneurial, evidence of my talents, skills, and knowledge. But I am
now a category—single parent on welfare—not a human being. And people, especially
those who work or otherwise profit from the welfare system, think they know who I am,
because all they see is a category. It seems to me that those who create and implement
oppressive policies dehumanize poor people so that they can carry on without guilt. What
I wanted to talk about at the conference was not the barriers I have encountered; rather, I
wanted to speak about how I have actively engaged in a process of learning that is useful.
I have survived many barriers set up by government against my survival. When I went to
a local employment program a couple of years ago, I was told to stay home and raise my
children. I discovered later that the program was “creaming,” and I was not considered
the cream of the crop. I took one course at a time from the Open Learning Agency and
completed my undergraduate degree. This was the only access to formal post-secondary
education for me. Some time ago, I had to declare bankruptcy after taking several years
of university classes, and could not get a student loan. Now I’m studying, by distance
education, for a master’s degree in creative writing. I was able to get another student
loan; now I’m off welfare, but my poverty remains. I wonder sometimes if I’ll end up an
educated poor person instead of just a poor person.
What I wanted to talk about was my experience over the past three years of learning
my way, on my own terms, not based on someone else’s imposed view of my interests
and capacity. Shauna, you call this self-directed learning. What I had hoped to do was
work with other single mothers to find a business venture that we could all participate in
as a cooperative or collective. I had hopes that this venture would be based on some
principles such as fair trade, anti-poverty activism, and a women-centered perspective
that honors the everyday and often invisible work that women do. I helped to organize the
Surrey Collective, a small group of single mothers with children of various ages all living
in Surrey. The group was small, sometimes three people, sometimes more. Some
members left and new ones joined. There were conflicts and tensions as we worked
toward finding some way of earning an income through a cooperative venture. We were
not economically successful. We could not transcend the market. But the learning that
I’ve gone through has been invaluable even if it did not facilitate economic justice. My
language and approach to my economic reality is much more grounded now in terms of
economic survival. I no longer use elitist terms or knowledge associated with anti-
poverty ideology.
How we name ourselves is important. I have no problem saying I am a poor woman,
but this characterization was not shared by all members of the collective. I am on social
assistance and identify myself as an antipoverty activist. My mother was part of this
group since we began, but she is not comfortable with some of my anti-poverty ideology,
nor that spoken by others who might consider themselves “progressive.” She worked for
twenty-five years for a large department store, and in those twenty-five years she took a
total of two weeks sick time. She was laid off after the store closed last year. She
participated in a job-search club that she found was somewhat helpful. At least you could
use their fax machine and computers to prepare your résumé. It had been a while since
she had been out looking for work. A native woman joined the group for a short while;
she did not identify herself as poor or low income or native. She had recently obtained a
full-time job (where she has hopes of advancement) after taking a welfare-to-work
Public acts 20
training program in computers. I’m not going to say anything more about other members
of our group. But I wanted to give you a bit of a sense of my context.
I also wanted to emphasize that, even in this small group, we are all quite different.
Statistically we are all living below the poverty line, but our views of the world and life
experiences are very diverse. We all fit the category of low-income single mothers, but
beyond that we are very different. We don’t share an anti-poverty ideology.
I was thinking about your concern that I would be the token poor person in the room at
the conference. My greatest fear isn’t being looked on by others as “the poor person.” My
greatest fear is having to sit through several hours of boring information given in
terminology that I don’t quite understand and find completely useless. My other fear is
that this particular group, and the work that I’ve tried to do, won’t meet the expectations
of the conference participants. The collective members are not leftists or anti-poverty
activists in any middle-class-imposed sense of the word. The only thing we have in
common is trying to get out of poverty.
Even in our collective, I hear derogatory comments about poor people. There is lots of
poor bashing by poor people. How can this be? Maybe people on welfare are seen as
betraying their own class somehow. This prejudice is often directed toward women with
children. There is this belief that, if there were no women and children and men on
welfare, we would all be living in prosperity. Somehow the question of who would take
care of the children and who would take paid employment never gets addressed.
We’re prevented from working together in any leftist capacity as antipoverty activists
or as feminists or any other-ists because we’re forced by the government to participate in
employment programs that force us to compete with each other for jobs and also for
positions in community-based government groups. It’s a constant atmosphere of
competition and struggle. The privatization of nonprofit organizations and the co-opting
of government funds has created a management culture. The only real point of entry out
of welfare is into this privatized arena where, instead of being a welfare recipient, you
now get to manage someone else on welfare. Even the activists who claim to be radical
set themselves up as social experts. Everyone wants to be a rock star or an academic. I
get scared, quite frankly, when I hear expressions like “lifelong learning” or “community
based” or “empowerment” or “democracy.” They are slogans, in my experience, that hide
a process of exclusion, not democracy and inclusion.
Since I was turned away from the employment program, which had zero to offer me
anyway even if I had been let in, I’ve become someone who is working outside the
system to build structures and resources, which has some potential. The resources that
you have given us, Shauna, are helpful, but not in the ways you might first imagine them
to be. The experience of having a computer in the home has been a rare opportunity for
someone as low income as myself. I’ve learned much about the anti-globalization
movement. I’ve read a lot of bullshit. I have learned that working in the system is not
useful to poor people. I’ve learned to see the bullshit very well. I can now use that
knowledge to survive in ways that are grounded in my real life. I’ve learned weaknesses
in ideologies that I would be ignorant of if I didn’t have access to a computer. I’ve gone
from being someone who knew very little about the political economy and felt incapable
of even typing, to being someone who can critique neoliberal policies as well as the
rhetoric of anti-globalization. That’s important, it’s important to my survival to learn
what is bullshit and what is not bullshit and how to articulate, not necessarily speak, with
my mouth, from my perspective. And, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much in terms of
economic survival, I can install hardware into a modem and create a java script—all in
the space of two years—while also doing the grueling job of raising two infant girls by
myself. Much of this learning has been because of my connection with you, Shauna. Our
relationship has been that you asked us what we believed or were told we needed and
found a way to bring these resources to us. Through access to the Internet, for example, I
have learned to critique a load of bullshit; along with my concrete experiences, this has
improved my ability to survive in poverty.
I’ve got a splitting headache at the moment….
Shauna:
I’m glad you think that I have been a support to you, that I have respected your wishes.
It’s been a challenging relationship at times when I have been humbled and reminded of
my narrow perspective. I remember when I first broached the subject of undertaking
some research with other single mothers on welfare. I had an idea that you and another
member of the collective might interview other single mothers about their experiences
with welfare-to-work programs. You looked at the questions I had developed and very
clearly told me that it wouldn’t work. Who would want to talk about their experiences of
poverty, what would they gain from it, how could you ask these questions of someone
else? It was a painful but powerful moment in our relationship.
So much of what you have articulated about how the system doesn’t work mirrors
what I have read in the feminist academic literature, but your way of speaking makes it
much more real and grounded and powerful. I’ve given you some of these articles. Our
conversations about their somewhat abstract ideas and your lived reality have been a
wonderful education for me. Some of their ideas you found to be very true and insightful,
and others you challenged. Your discussions about the continuous surveillance that you
have to live with, the constant filling out of forms, the way you are always under
scrutiny, made me think of Carol Pateman’s (1992) work. She looked at the contradiction
between the social reality of subordination and the official story of equality and full
citizenship in discussions about the social contract. She suggests that we examine the
underlying assumptions, especially the idea of consent. Contract theory, she argues, is
primarily about social relationships constituted by subordination, not about exchange.
The new social contract relationship is structured through time by permanent exchange of
obe-dience for protection. The one party to the contract that provides protection has the
right to determine how the other party will act to fulfill his or her side of the exchange.
I find Pateman’s look at what lies underneath the social contact very useful. It seems
to me to offer a clear description of some of your experiences, Amanda. I remember the
other day you talked about how tired you are of being grateful, of having to express
gratitude, that there is no place, in the system, that is, to express your anger. This form of
coercive gratitude seems to me what Pateman is talking about when she explores
subordination.
You also spoke vividly and clearly about how privatization works. I suggested it was a
kind of insidious expansion of the welfare state. You argued that it is not about
decentralizing power, it was a way for government to have even more power because
they contract out the services where poor women encounter the system. Because of
funding cuts and rewards for reducing welfare roles, we have a situation much like
Public acts 22
Yeatman (1998) discussed in her description of contractualist entrepreneurialism. In this

situation, each party to the contract—both government and contractor—are not oriented
to public values or public-oriented motives. In these arrangements, both parties are
oriented to market-oriented action, with competitive dynamics and utility maximization
being the focus. Your description of your experiences with these agencies illuminates the
negative outcomes of such an approach.
In many ways, you are far more connected to the issue of globalization than I am.
Your thoughts made me think of Hester Lessard (1997), another scholar who explored the
struggle to get social rights in the constitution. She found that these rights are considered
secondary to a “natural” market that is larger and beyond democratic control and
regulation. Social well-being is to be traded off against economic interests. Lessard,
much like you, argues that we need to question the assumption that globalized markets
are a “natural” force that is no longer accountable to political communities. We need to
question the separation between the economic and social spheres and the primacy
accorded the economic sphere. We need to examine the ideology of public and private
dichotomy that informs these separations.
Another of your insights has been about public and private patriarchy. I think you’d
like what Patricia Evans (1997) has to say. She studied the debates in this country
[Canada] about income security. She sees the latter as an ideological marker that
constructs entitlements to benefits and confers different statuses—claimant, beneficiary,
recipient—where the nature of the benefit can constitute either a badge of citizenship or
noncitizenship. Social assistance marks a shift from private patriarchy to public
patriarchy. For some this is a good shift because women do not have to live in relations of
violence. We have a two-track model with women overrepresented in the social-
assistance track and men overrepresented in the social-insurance track. Various
approaches have been tried to deal with inequalities between men and women, and some
countries, such as those in Scandinavia, have attempted to attach value to unpaid work.
But no country has done anything significant in terms of sharing unpaid labor,
particularly child care. Evans suggests that, given this kind of ideological backdrop to
Canada’s welfare state, it is essential to reassert women’s claim to paid employment and
to recognize that women’s responsibility for caring for others will not be adequately
compensated in the absence of labor-force attachment. She also says that it is essential to
recognize that claims to paid employment that do not acknowledge women’s caring
responsibilities are claims that will benefit only the most affluent of working women. She
concludes that the full exercise of women’s citizenship requires an equitable division of
unpaid labor, but this will not likely to be achieved through public policy initiatives.
Amanda:
I like what Patricia Evans has to say. I think it’s the most important subject. Let me say
something about child care, as a single mother on welfare. There is a clear message that
this caring work I do is not valued, that it does not count. If I were to participate in a
training program or find a low-waged job, I would have to find inadequate child care
because the costs of such care are not covered by any assistance I would be eligible for.
The messages are completely contradictory. On the one hand, I should stay at home with
my children. This is what my employment counselor told me to do. On the other hand, I
am told I am a drain on the system and should go out to work, leaving my children with
someone else. If I did that, I would be told that I am a bad mother, leaving my children in
inadequate care. There is much in this situation of poverty that resembles slavery. This is
an oppression of the body. It is my body that is enslaved. I cannot escape my condition
no matter what physical activities I might engage in to try to escape. I have two options in
front of me: to be a slave in the cheap labor pool that is increasing with globalized
capitalism, or be a private slave as someone’s wife. How the system treats single mothers
with children is appalling; it reveals the exploitation of mothers and children and how our
bodies are used to prop up the market.
At one time we were talking about what it means to be poor in a rich land, an
experience someone described as a mix of “profanity and promises.” It is interesting to
consider the meaning of the word “profanity”: “the state or quality of having or indicating
contempt, irreverence or disrespect for a divinity or something sacred; not initiated into
the inner mysteries or sacred rites” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1979, p. 1167). On a
daily basis I experience marginalization and alienation from the mainstream culture, one
profoundly shaped by consumerism, a culture that places me in an enormous
contradiction. I must participate, but at the same time I cannot participate. I am enslaved,
rather than a citizen in the consumer culture. As work that pays a living wage becomes
increasingly more difficult to access and as poor bashing is taken up with more vigor by
the state and the mainstream media, my very presence, my physical existence, and
therefore my body, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be used. It seems that my own
power to say what happens to my body is a threat to a rampant and nasty form of
individualistic bootstrapism thinly veiled by arguments for a particular kind of work
ethic.
Even ideas about justice are often intellectual rather than discussions that are in the
body. For example, the authors you mentioned have important things to say, but
sometimes their words scare me. Listening to these eloquent and learned analyses of the
context of my life is far removed from my own struggle to survive in poverty. These
scholars place so much value on their words, as though they could speak something holy
that will save us all. All this learned crap has been, for the most part for me, a process of
depoliticization and inaccessibility to privileged knowledge about the economy. These
encounters leave me with a sense of great shame and powerlessness. I sometimes have
felt profound embarrassment that comes from powerlessness, although I feel that sense of
shame less and less as I learn to cut through the bullshit.
I was at a forum some time ago where the goal was to come up with activities that the
community organizations that were present could do to reduce what they called “child
hunger.” After hearing a panel of speakers, the audience was broken up by some
mysterious selection process and we then became a number of small discussion groups. I
got stuck in a group with a bunch of non-poor people, listening to a load of talk about
ideas far removed from my reality. I heard from the other people in that discussion group
that what is needed is to expand lunch programs and various other acts of institutional
charity. One woman emphasized that the poor need to be given incentives to work. I said
that it would be helpful to expand the ways that we define anti-poverty work so that
people could bring their knowledge to the table to share the ways of pracitical survival
that may exist outside the system.
I don’t know why I thought this was important to say. Maybe I just wanted to
embarrass the do-gooders at the forum. Of course the facilitator of the discussion group
Public acts 24
looked at me like I had just insulted her. She responded, “Yes, but we’re looking for
insights today.” My point was then dismissed. This forum wasn’t about working with the
poor, but governing us. The forum participants were bureaucrats, far removed from
poverty for the most part. One person piped up that the problem of hunger for working
people, not only for those on welfare, also needs to be addressed. I said that in my
experience people on welfare were the working poor, that a dichotomy does not exist.
The person who had made the comment then eyed me with a look of resentment rather
than appreciation for my knowledge as a poor woman.
These small discussion groups then came back together as a coalition to share their
lists of insights. None of my words made it to the final collaboration of what had come
out of the group discussions. What these non-poor people came up with was a list of acts
of charity that they and their organizations could do to reduce what they call “child
hunger.” It was clear to me that the particpants were interested only in ideas that could
allow their respective organizations to obtain grants. One group advocated giving dented
cans of food donated by corporations; another group thought it would be good to get
senior citizens to teach the poor how to prepare food. There was the inevitable suggestion
that we poor people be taught how to budget.
The talk in the room that day was not about poverty—it was about privilege and who
got to keep their privileges—the well-groomed, wellfed members of the organizational
committee who were following the mandates of their employment and other
organizational leaders. They weren’t willing or able to ask why hunger among children
exists. I think they were afraid to ask; such dissent might cost them their jobs. Call it
classism. A wise woman I know observes that “even though someone might be a moron
who hasn’t thought about poverty issues more than five minutes, because they are dressed
nicely and have a position they feel qualified to saunter up to the microphone; then
whatever useless drivel comes out of their mouths carries far more weight than what we
have to say, we who live in poverty.”
There was fear that day. And censorship. There was little sense that we’re all in this
together. There was little sense that the destruction of our social safety net is a problem
we all share. None of those bureaucrats dared to think the poor might have knowledge
about survival. The bureaucratic code reigned supreme, and I, as a poor person, was left
with no place or adequate language to express what the real barriers might be in reducing
my poverty. Now my shameful secret is that what I said to those people in the small
discussion group might have given them the illusion that I know lots about the economy.
I don’t. I’m no social expert. I only know lots about surviving while being poor. I’m too
busy surviving at the poverty level with my children to read and carry around all the
statistics and responses to combat myths about poverty. It’s enough to keep me silent. In
certain desperate moments I find I have no language.
I have also found inspiration in some of the authors. Noam Chomsky, in his video,
Manufacturing Consent, said that “as long as some specialized class is in a position of
authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions
of survival and justice require rational, special planning in the interests of the community
of a whole, and by now that means the global community” (1992). Let me close with this
quote from the Bible in Proverbs 28:11, which says, “the rich man is wise in his own
eyes, but the poor man who has understanding sees through him.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE
We began with a quote from Freire and will close with one as well. We think his work
also speaks to the kind of research relationships we would like to endorse, relationships
that support and work in solidarity with the oppressed who are already engaging in efforts
to transform an unjust reality:
To divide the oppressed, an ideology of oppression is indispensable. In

contrast, achieving their unity requires a form of cultural action through
which they come to know the why and how of their adhesion to reality—it
requires a de-ideologizing. Hence, the effort to unify the oppressed does
not call for mere ideological “sloganizing.” The latter, by distorting the
authentic relation between the Subject and objective reality, also separates
the cognitive, the affective, and the active aspects of the total, indivisible
personality.
The object of dialogical-libertarian action is not to “dislodge” the
oppressed from a mythological reality in order to “bind” them to another
reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it
possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to
transform an unjust reality. (emphasis in original) (1970, 174)
REFERENCES
Burbules, N. 1993. Dialogue in teaching—Theory and practice. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Chomsky, N. 1992. Manufacturing Consent. Video recording, National Film Board of Canada,
Montreal.
Evans, P. 1997. Divided citizenship? Gender, income security, and the welfare state. In Women and
the Canadian welfare state—Challenges and change, edited by P.Evans and G.R.Wekerle.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. In The Paulo Freire Reader, edited by Ana Maria
Araujo Freire and Donaldo P.Macedo. New York: Continuum.
Lessard, H. 1997. Creation stories: Social rights and Canada’s constitution. In Women and the
Canadian welfare state—Challenges and change, edited by P.Evans and G.R.Wekerle. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Nhat Hanh, T. 1978. The raft is not the shore. Boston: Beacon Press.
Pateman, C. 1992. The patriarchal welfare state. In Defining women: Social institutions and gender
divisions, edited by L.McDowell and R.Pringle. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
Rimstead, R. 2001. Remnants of nation: On poverty narratives by women. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Yeatman, A. 1998. Activism and the policy process. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
2
DESIRE AND BETRAYAL
IN COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH
INTRODUCTION
The overwrought title of this piece mirrors the alchemy of motives shared by social
science researchers and “subjects,” motives that are rendered invisible in the research
process. Gradually, through our training as researchers and educators, and our subsequent
work in various communities, we are becoming more aware of the motives we bring to
our endeavor. Often, these motives are grouped under one dubious classification:
“biases.” In this chapter, I describe the quality of these motives and recognize two strong
elements to our bias: desire and betrayal. Understanding how these motives play out in
the field may help us guide our research actions. My initial premise is that, as we engage
with research, we inevitably desire someone/a cause/a way of making knowledge
public—and we favor it—only to betray another.1 My explication of how we need to
acknowledge and explore the ethical value of desire and betrayal rests on examples from
community-based research (CBR) where this inevitability is present in the deployment of
identity and intimacy.
In this chapter, I examine the role of community-based researchers and our unstable
situation by using a guiding metaphor of La Malinche. The figure of the enslaved Aztec
family who became the conquistador Cortez’s translator and a confidante and is said to
have betrayed the trust of her own people by helping him in his invasion of the Aztec
world is a metaphor for Gemini-like identities born within the conditions of community-
based research. I provide a description of CBR and its ability to empower or hinder
radical research and pedagogical methodologies. Concurrently, the relevance of CBR in
any program of ethical transfor-mation in the social sciences and education is underlined.
Community-based research is able to offer propitious arrangements to engage in various
kinds of popular education work and action/emancipatory research. I sketch how desire,
and by extension betrayal, are nomadic and how they ghostwrite2 our CBR projects.
Embedded in my explanation is Michel Foucault’s urge to “believe that what is
productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1983, xiii) and,
I dare add, promiscuous. In short, our quest for making knowledge public is biased,
nomadic, and licentious.
Throughout this text, I invoke various examples in CBR because it is in this home
where I have cradled my thoughts. In the first case, a mixed-methods research study of
quality of life at an AIDS care unit, I describe how community-based researchers are
often placed in the curious situation of disclosing their identities, alliances, and insiders’
information, even their queer identity, only to see it downplayed as anecdotal. In contrast,
in the second case, a community-based inquiry on the relationship between sexual
identification/behavior and homelessness among queer and questioning kids in
Vancouver’s inner city—the Pridehouse experience—I detect an odd reversal. By having
Desire and betrayal in community-based research 27
started from a position of full disclosure, our research team faced intimate challenges
when trying to apply rigorously some of the conventional tools of research. The
subject/researchers rebelled; the methods did not seem to suffice. The third case, about a
national community-based HIV/AIDS research project illustrates desire and betrayal in
the national arena, probably less harmful to specific individuals but seemingly less
productive. In all three cases, some similar questions apply. Does advancing knowledge
need to be intimate, perilous, and ambivalent in order to be productive? Or, conversely,
do conventional forms of making knowledge public, such as basic science research, take
care of the “subjects” by not reciprocating, by looking without ever seeing what is really
there? I conclude this exploration by betraying you, my own reader, and not offering
answers at all, but an invitation to thrive in the uncertainty, anxiety, and ambivalence3 of
research projects that include our biases, love, desire, and betrayal. I suggest that more
than mere thematic threads, uncertainty, anxiety, and ambivalence are ethical
considerations necessary to make knowledge public.
WHAT IS CBR?
Community-based research is “a philosophy for inquiry and not a discreet research

framework” (Allman et al. 1997, 21);4 it is a river into which the tributaries from
feminist, Marxist, queer, and environmentalist thought feed. Action research,
participatory research, and emancipatory research—the “decolonizing methodologies”
(Tuhiwai-Smith 1999) and “methodologies of the oppressed” (Sandoval 2000)—are often
used within this type of research. Most CBR includes a commitment to learn, a form of
collaborative popular education—sometimes described as “transfer of knowledge” and
“capacity building”—in which all the participants systematically learn about their
environment, accrue and examine what can constitute evidence, and re-present it by/for
themselves and for others.
CBR is tactical and happens, as Michel de Certeau has described it, “in plain view of
the enemy”5 and its power/knowledge is, as Foucault noticed, deployed at the “capillary”
level. In CBR, one not only learns about method, analysis, and reporting, as Erica
Meiners points out (Chapter 9 in this collection), but one also unlearns old ways of
conceiving and carrying out research. It is through this tactical pedagogical way that CBR
seeps into institutions and their agendas. It often involves tweaking the rules and budget
just slightly, remaining ethical and seeing an incremental change happen. In this sense,
CBR can be also seen as a “popular technology”; that is to say, a more-or-less discernible
set of tools/texts, procedures, and sociality around them (e.g., advisory committee
meetings reports, “logic models,” needs assessments, environmental scans, workshops,
“train-the-trainers “etc.). It is also an area where political and personal motivations and
spheres of influence intersect and nest each other to approach the world inductively or
deductively and advance, replicate, corroborate, debunk, or simply indulge (why not?)
new and old knowledges.
In 2002 I collaborated with the folks of the Manitoba AIDS Cooperative, a consortium
of AIDS service organizations and peer-driven projects. I was commissioned to train
members of the organization in a few basic research skills. We organized the training
activity as a treasure hunt. Four teams of peer volunteers (mostly Aboriginal/First
Public acts 28
Nations)6 and frontline workers followed the instructions in an envelope that contained a
task sheet—for example, “Identify a current need or issue and define it as a research
question”—and a checklist. Once they had completed the task, they checked whether
their response met some necessary criteria—for example, “the research question reliably
reflects a need/gap/interest in the community.” If they had met at least three of the main
criteria proposed, they could solve a riddle at the bottom of the checklist to find the next
envelope, and so on. If they did not meet any of the criteria, the group found ways of
justifying their research step or discussed potential ways of amending their research
process amongst them and aided by three co-facilitators. In two days, all groups went
through all the stages of a “real” research program. The final activity—adapted from
political workshops with union members—was to list “next steps” and who would take
the responsibility of bringing these ideas forward to the appropriate committees or boards
of directors. No research proposal came out of this two-day workshop, but it generated a
discussion on roles and boundaries for peer volunteers and the misgivings of some
frontline workers. Significantly, our “research work” focused on discussing their current
challenges, their perceived lack of direct participation in the organization, and even issues
related to the restricted access (what is called “low” or “high threshold” in the current
lingo) of volunteers to the buildings supposedly designed to offer ample space and
opportunities for gathering and carrying out activities. We had the chance to continue
some of this work a year later with one of the participating organizations in the form of a
consultation on peer involvement and a forum. What is it, then, research or pedagogy or
activism? Hard to say. As I stated earlier, when we engage with CBR, we inevitably favor
someone/a cause/a way of making knowledge to betray another. I use “inevitably” to
convey the presence of an inherent dialectic between desire (love, motivations that are
sometimes at odds with each other) and betrayal (rejection of conventional ways)—not to
mean “a destiny.”
Community-based research is intimate. My use of “intimacy” echoes Tuhiwai-Smith’s
definition of community as an “intimate, human, and self-defined space” (1999, 127) in
contrast with “field.”7 Tuhiwai-Smith adds that “[c]ommunity action approaches assume
that people know and can reflect on their own lives, have questions and priorities of their
own, have skills and sensitivities which can enhance (or undermine) any community-
based projects” (127). Her parenthetical use of “undermine” foreshadows an element of
betrayal. In more intimate research settings, things can and should go wrong. Betrayal, as
described here, is part and parcel of a project’s “catalytic validity” (Lather 1991, 68)—a
project acquires validity for a community once we have been able to survive its
vicissitudes and repercussions, as I describe later in the case of the Pridehouse research
project in Vancouver, British Columbia. This intimacy of most CBR allows us to chart
what Michel Foucault called “the movements of desire” necessary to achieve “austerity,”
that is to say, the “ethical transformation of the self” (Foucault 1990, 27–28; see also 91–
93).8
Community-based research is often carried out by cultural workers who inhabit these
intimate borderlines between academic institutions (including schools) and communities
(including nongovernmental and/or non-profit organizations—NGOs). Sometimes
mavericks, some-times groups, the individuals who carry out CBR seldom sit leisurely
within a canon. I name us cultural workers because our métier often spills over the
institutional boundaries of research to popular pedagogy and activism.9 Also, many of us
volunteer—a role often overlooked—in projects or programs of investigation. From

different vantage points and under conditions not of our own choosing, we engage in
CBR.10
BECOMING A RESEARCHER, BECOMING LA MALINCHE
Historically, La Malinche is said to have been the enslaved daughter of a noble Aztec
family who was given to Hernan Cortez as a gift around 1519. She became Cortez’s
translator and a confidante and bore him a child. It is said that, by betraying the trust of
her own people, she helped Cortez in his invasion of the Aztec world. My choice of
guiding metaphor/character is not to simply accentuate the exotic, it is to reflect and
illuminate our long-drawn yearning for what we do not have—the Other—the desire that
traverses community-based research and popular education.
La Malinche has become “the transfigured symbol of fragmented identity” and
“merging cultures” (Franco 1999, 6–7). Distinctively, her virgin/whore ambivalence
belongs in el nuevo mundo of the Americas and she is an Other that is really an Us—or
better, “a third voice” (Sandoval 2000, 155.5)—infused with mestizaje (e.g., the hybrid
Spanglish), romanticism, eroticism, and gender bending (as men betray their compadres
by acting out/through femininity),11 and infused with strong postcolonial connotations.
Latin American intellectual workers in fields as diverse as political economy and
psychology have employed the term Malinchismo to denote not only weakness for what
is foreign but also seduction. I expect no grand narrative in Malinchismo; instead I
observe a disordering of the missionary narrative positions. It is not longer clear who is
on top (el conquistador, el gringo) and who is (at) the bottom (el indio).
The ghost of La Malinche embodies the ambivalence that cultural workers bring upon
our CBR work. As in La Malinche’s exemplary story, CBR—doing it—involves a
retorted ivy of desire and betrayal. In a parallel to the hybrid role of La Malinche, CBR
researchers often act as translators/facilitators. They are frequently called on to open
research agendas and protocols; to liaise among advisory committees, frontline workers,
funders, and policymakers; to interpret and make recommendations on how research
outcomes will benefit or hinder a community. As I will show later in this text, this
openness to participation, translation, interpretation, and seduction makes for intriguing
research arrangements in CBR.
DESIRE MADE VISIBLE/EL DESEO A FLOR DE PIEL
Desire has been conceptualized in connection with “differential consciousness”

“difference,” “third voice” (in Sandoval 2000) and “pleasure,” “erotics “and “true love”
by Foucault—call it what you will, it remains a force that, at its most primeval, can be
witnessed as exposed appetite. In CBR, the “subject” of research is placed at the center;
the research is intended to be driven by its “owners,” and this requires a degree of
disclosure. For example, in CBR on HIV/AIDS participants are often—and not always
subtly—compelled to disclose their identity and lived experience as homosexuals or
ethnic minorities, or worse, as impoverished drug users or sex-trade workers. Can CBR
Public acts 30
researchers actually say, “This is who I am. These are my intentions”? I think the answer
is “no.” Hence, how do community-based researchers experience this disclosure of their
desire, this differential consciousness, this brutal public exposure?
Community-based researchers’ motives are often made visible in ambivalent ways,
significantly, in our desire to belong, embody, or at least capture an intimate experience
of the Other. Individuals and NGOs, for example, envy the legitimacy and authority of
institutional research that often harnesses their funding cycles. University-based
academics, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, want to “go native.”
And thus, the movements of desire in CBR transform researchers in unexpected ways. In
my work, and in my lived experience, I have been particularly interested in the cases in
which the native/subject gradually becomes (like) the foreigner/outsider. In my doctoral
work I identified a number of key informants I term “organic researchers” after
Gramsci’s definition of “organic intellectual,”12 who started as “natives.” Through
gradual involvement in HIV/AIDS activism and research, they/we carved out a niche for
themselves in institution-based research. Our desire to acquire institutional authority and
leverage has charted our trajectories in paradoxical ways: our increased institutional
credibility and authority is perceived as a merger with the authority of long-standing
historical antagonists—the medic, the epidemiologist, and the university-based
researchers. Frontline workers can often be heard criticizing research and researchers for
producing nothing tangible, effecting no change. Researchers grumble that frontline
service does not improve because frontline workers do not pause to consider evidence of
“best practices,” do not follow those pesky “logic models” for programming and evalua-
tion. Frontline workers retort that they do not have the privilege and luxury of sitting and
mulling over reports and data…and so on. In any case, organic researchers in AIDS have
contributed to a rapprochement between these sectors.13 In the 1990s, Health Canada
created a CBR fund within its HIV/AIDS division. More recently, research technical
assistants (RTAs) are being hired from among folks well seasoned in community work to
support community-based organizations in their work on HIV/AIDS.
While organic researchers are invited/elbow their way up institutional ladders, they are
also pressured to accommodate the existing patriarchal culture of research in the basic
and social sciences. In some cases, the organic researcher is reduced to a token voice
from the community. In others, zigzagging between solidarity and betrayal, community-
based researchers/educators are placed in situations where we seem to be working for as
well as against the interests and investments of various communities—even our own
communities. For example, the inclusion/intrusion of organic researchers (and their CBR
agendas) in institutional research—the Malinche, translator and informant—is often
perilous because it signals the “crisis of legitimation,” that is to say, a need to revisit
research values traditionally upheld as absolute and fundamental. Thus, the traditional
perception of science as objective, detached, and clean is projected on researchers and
educators. CBR organic researchers—or at least their work—are often perceived as role
models of what is “untainted” and “responsible” that merges science, values, emotion,
and even faith. However, this turns out to be a double standard when organic researchers
are required, implicitly or explicitly, to remain silent and keep invisible the movements of
their desire, their “personal” practices, and the ways these influence their engagement
with the research process and various communities.14 Often these are the very
characteristics that get them their employment in the first place. In the following sections,
I offer three specific examples of the desire/betrayal dialectic in CBR in an attempt to

explain why this ambivalence might be central and necessary to CBR.15
THE CASE STUDIES
At the Dr. Peter Centre: The Displacement of Queer

In the year 20001 collaborated on a CBR study on issues of engagement in rehabilitation
and quality of life at the Dr. Peter Centre, a unique AIDS “day-care” in Canada serving a
vulnerable group of HIV-positive persons whose health is in decline (Ibáñez-Carrasco
and Kerr 2001).16 I was fresh off my doctoral dissertation and aware that my
investigation into the sociology of health science was not a “marketable” knowledge. At
the Dr. Peter Centre I was given some latitude to implement the qualitative research
component of the research study on quality-of-life issues as long as I administered the
surveys for the quantitative section of the research.17
I was invited to do research at the Dr. Peter Centre because of my HIV status as well
as my research skills. This worried me because I wanted to escape the typecast of being
HIV positive. For a whole year, the research process weighed on me with ambivalence. I
often wondered whether to favor my cultural outsider/insider’s insights/intimacy or the
scientific analysis/distance. For example, it was, and still is, hard to talk about behavioral
patterns of gay men in the third person—not a third voice—in my professional
discussions with other colleagues.18 If I “personalize” the analysis, or disclose my
sources—sometimes my very own lived experience—I am summarily discounted. I could
not (kiss and) tell, “I know gay men use drugs or alcohol for this or other reasons, I am
with them in bathhouses, I have had (bareback) sex with them, I have used myself.” In
this way, central information is often displaced to the periphery as anecdotal. How can
community-based researchers allow identity, lived experience, and scientific theory to
coexist in our “professional” practice? If they could, in what ways?
Our survey administration became life-history reviews. In addition, we scanned four
years’ worth of weekly notes on “community meetings” to obtain narrative evidence of
significant issues related to rehabilitation and quality of life for Dr. Peter Centre
participants (these are written, compiled, and sometimes illustrated by participants). In
addition to interviews with participants and staff, we conducted a series of inventive
focus groups with the participants. These focus groups included spatial mapping of
everyday trajectories at the center, using the floor plan to link places and motives,
“walkabouts” with staff to elicit narratives of rehabilitation embodied in physical spaces,
and participant observation.19
Our research collaboration encouraged the participants to own the process and the
results of the research. Key members of this community, those in positions of organic
leadership, held us accountable to them and facilitated the process with those who were
reluctant to participate, which is great support when working with a group of people who
have been systematically disenfranchised and neglected. A number of the staff—
composed of therapists, nurses, administrative, and operations personnel—were included
not only in our data-collection samples but also in our training of grassroots-research
techniques.
Public acts 32
It was near the end of our research stint that Thomas Kerr, my co-researcher, and I
came to a disagreement that evidenced our “bias.” What I interpreted as a social fact of
displacement of gay men by straights20—social inequality—was seen by Thomas as a
similar number of opportunities for heterosexuals and homosexuals to engage in
rehabilitation at the center, a fact clearly supported by the quantitative data. What was
local seemed egalitarian in the context of quantitative data; when placed in a global
sociopolitical context, however, a phenomenon of queer displacement from AIDS service
organizations seemed visible to me. The survey results and the qualitative data needed to
be interpreted within this larger context (often perceived as external to the center’s
success). In brief, one could see this element only if one actively looked for it and
situated oneself in that perspective. In research, this looks not only biased but downright
arbitrary. However, we know that we should “become answerable for what we learn how
to see” and that objectivity is “about limited location and situated knowledge.” In my
view, the dwindling number of gay men in AIDS service organizations is not only an
indication of anti-HIV treatment success, social acceptance, and generalized optimism,
but is also evidence of an organizational and social phenomenon of displacement and
neglect toward gay men (HIV negative and HIV positive) within a precarious continuum
of care and treatment.21
Although our findings described mostly positive impacts on the quality of life of the
participants at the center in the form of therapeutic alliances/engagements, it also
underlined that such alliances/engagements were often made from positions of traditional
disadvantage, in a framework of “addiction/recovery,”22 and in the absence of a “harm
reduction” program and policy. This combination made the center a sort of “terminal
station” and not a stepping stone to social reinsertion (which might include drug-use
maintenance as well as a return to the workforce). Although we cannot credit the findings
of the report solely with prompting changes to some of the policies and practices of the
Dr. Peter Centre, in 2002 the staff began to implement harm-reduction policies in radical
ways. While the City of Vancouver was still discussing (and having a political election
controversy) safe injection sites, the Dr. Peter Centre began to implement supervised drug
injections, which is still ongoing at the time of this writing.
As is often the case in community-based work, meeting the needs of some will always
hinder or risk the opportunities of others. A supervised safe-injection site within a center
that offers everything from complementary therapies to daily meals services may further
discourage gay men’s use of the services and facility, even when a number of those gay
men may use illicit drugs.23 My role as scientist in CBR calls for consensus and
collaboration, but this democratic practice puts me in an ambivalent role. I relish the
contribution that we might have made toward such a radical practice of care at the Dr.
Peter Centre, and, at the same time I struggle with the mainstream denial of the
displacement and disregard that the medical/scientific community is showing toward gay
men. Many of the issues that directly affect gay men (including HIV, depression, and
party drugs) take a back seat in relation to the issue of drug addiction. The Malinchismo
of focusing the attention and funding on the “new,” “foreign,” and “exotic” issue of drug
use is defensible, but it must not obliterate the presence of care and educational work that
still needs to be done for three different generations of gay men (HIV long-term
survivors, adult HIV-negative gay men, and “queer and questioning” youth). Our
Malinchismo disregards the community work of an entire generation of GLBT/queers to

obtain respectful and appropriate research, education, and health/social services.
The disregard extends to the areas of CBR and basic science research: a number of
current investigations are dedicated to issues of epidemiology among gay men (youth,
raves, and the consumption of party drugs), but it is difficult to fund studies about the
sexuality and sociality of gay men.24 In the final report for the Dr. Peter Centre study, I
was confident that we had reported responsibly, but I felt that we also contributed to,
once again, making invisible the desire of gay men and other GLBT/queer people. Even
within CBR, the practices of making knowledge public continue to be entrenched in
traditional academic formats and values, and there is little dignified space to voice the
movements of desire, such as one’s concerns about the displacement of queers.
In the Pridehouse: An Addiction to Drama

Some of this disregard of social science research for the sexuality and sociality of
GLBT/queers became evident in one collaborative research project on homelessness
among queer and questioning youth in the City of Vancouver conducted in the summer of
2002. In this case, this disregard translated into reduced funding, circumspect
commitment from sponsoring community-based agencies, and the institutional
difficulties the principal investigator encountered to obtain ethical consent to interview
homeless minors who often did not have parents, families, and custodians to consent for
them but who were willing to share their stories (de Castell and Jenson 2002). In many
respects, this was a queer experiment because we dealt with sexuality not only as a
variable in the lives of homeless youth aged 14 to 29 but also within the mixed-research
group of university and community-based youth. The training of the youth research team
in qualitative research methods, implementation, and results was an innovative and
democratic attempt at conducting participatory research. The research findings were
intriguing and solid and can be found in the existing report.25 The climate of conflict that
ensued within the research team was puzzling, however. As senior/adult professional
investigators, our desire to participate and research in ways that were meaningful to us
and to the young researchers might have played both for and against us. As leaders of the
research project, we were not prepared to deal with well-entrenched intergenerational and
power dynamics. Our naïve attempt to erase conventional authority roles in a short period
in the name of an idealized “common” sexuality/politics, supposedly a common force
that would propel us forward, was mediated by traditional behaviors and expectations
that needed much more time and effort to be dismantled. In vitro, we tried to dismantle a
beast (i.e., patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, class issues, etc.) that is
well and alive in our queer communities.
In addition, we were able to identify, but not fully manage, an element of “addiction to
drama”26 that exists in community-based work, which often involves nonmainstream
communities. I find it difficult to explain the desire and inherent drama of doing this kind
of research. When one first steps into the field, a as cultural outsider (to the populations
and to CBR), one sees grubby individuals who seem to want to stay drowned in hardship
and conflict. Now I see individuals in (sometimes ghostly) networks who thrive in spite
of hardship and conflict. Even doctors, nurses, and other professionals who work in the
turbulent inner cities do not always have a global understanding of the urban ebbs and
flows of desire that move the lives of individuals in seemingly negative directions. We
Public acts 34
need an understanding of this “addiction to drama” and other specific, intimate aspects of
CBR, much in the same way we are, at present, trying to understand other addictions as
social products of an almost behavioral training in how to live constantly under duress.27
Chela Sandoval excavates Foucault’s ideas of ethical self and argues that “[c] itizen-
subjects have become so surrounded and ‘trapped’ in our own histories of domination,
fear, pain, hatred, and hierarchy that the strategic adversary under postmodern times has
become our own sense of self” (2000, 163.4).28 Enraptured as we often are in our roles as
experts, research subjects, victims, heroes, or celebrities, we develop trust in the authority
that underwrites them—almost an act of faith. Often, in this epistemological alignment,
we turn a blind eye to the complexity and precariousness of our alliances. Thus, when we
act as educators for “Others” as researchers for “Others,”29 when we make knowledge for
“Others” we take the risk of making invisible the motives that place us there, entrenched
as we are in a limited repertoire of conventional and legitimized roles. It is in this petit
treason of the complexity/ambivalence of our moral/erotic investments—a betrayal to
others and to oneself—that one becomes a Malinche.
In our research team, this addiction to drama played out as protracted disagreements
over the value of some of the activities. For example, the implementation of a “Mobile
Midnite Picnic,” a NGO van improvised as a late-night food delivery for queer kids in
downtown Vancouver, created great controversy as to whether it was useful, charitable,
inappropriate, ethical, or efficient (to obtain interviews). There were many opposing and
mostly reasonable viewpoints and challenges: it was not possible to target only queer kids
without offering food to anyone else who would approach the van, many charities supply
food at night, young girls are not at liberty to approach or be approached by researchers
because they are often in oppressive relationships with older men or boys who are
passing as straight. I felt aggravated by the fact that I had to be out late at night delivering
food to poor people—sounds terrible, doesn’t it?—and that I had spent years of energy,
health, and money to get a Ph.D. to end up making a meager salary and doing the lackey
work. Little did I know that CBR is about doing the less glamorous research activities,
the angst-ridden gathering of data, the endless merry-go-round of training workshops, the
tedious gathering of literature references for others. In the long summer of 2002, the
hierarchy of research and researchers—who is in, who is out, who belongs, who only-
works-for-whom—harnessed my senses with blinding headlights. Sitting outside the
Dufferin Hotel, a seedy downtown bar and an obligatory stopover for queer and
questioning young men, I squirmed at my opportunism when getting interviews in
exchange for a few bucks so the kids would get a hit, a bathhouse room, or transportation
to wherever they would crash that night. My actions, somehow, did not feel too different
from the young men’s travail finding derelict sugar-daddies, securing a hit of crystal
meth, or dancing for paltry tips. Since then, my standards have not risen, but my lapsed
Catholic hangover has subsided somewhat.
Many colliding experiences and ideas of this sort existed in the Pridehouse research
project. Their ebb and flow imbued the team with anomie, as if we all wanted to sabotage
the work, only to shift into a euphoric gear the next minute. We all contributed to these
upswings and downturns. The demons one encounters in the community/research field, as
it were, must be exorcised in the process. Frequently, there is no time, resources, or
energy to do this. Do we, as Foucault suggests, become prisoners of our citizen-subject
power, the systems that are our masters and dominators? By playing into the hands of our
desires to be queer, to an almost “politically correct” degree—a drama of roles and role
reversals well entrenched in society—we betrayed our own expectations for one voice to
make knowledge public. Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (1989) question poignantly infected the
air: “Why doesn’t this feel empowering anymore?”
In CBR it is difficult to escape drama, not to take on the labels and identifications of
the study’s “population.” We are the border crossers, we go back and forth, and we live
in borrowed worlds. The grand narratives of objectivity and detachment make a full circle
back into the community-based researcher’s outlook, but only to be understood in a
different light. In this sense, in CBR we still struggle with the role of the researcher that
goes native and then leaves. This struggle is, in my view, valid but risky. One does not
“go native,” one becomes a migrant worker. One’s eventual withdrawal from a research
field/community and from the research team where one has participated in the drama of
its everyday activities often produces a sense of loss and betrayal. The community-based
researcher, often a translator between communities and funders and the mainstream—La
Malinche—often winds up as a traitor to a cause. Professional researchers who took part
in the Pridehouse project left behind those who belonged to the field—I still see the rent
boys we interviewed walking down Seymour Street. I have little left in common with my
former co-researchers—and this will always cause resentment to all those involved. How
could it be otherwise? Unlike conventional research that promises results to be used by
funders or policymakers, CBR, explicitly or implicitly, promises equality and social
justice whose benefits lie buried in the future; they are not immediate or tangible.
The PASS Study: Reflections on Minor Desire in a “Major League” Research

In 2002, I was hired as a coordinator and research assistant for a national community-
based study to test four methods of collecting information about “adverse events”30 to
anti-HIV drugs from people living with HIV in Canada. In contrast with my previous job,
this research had a large budget, an epidemiologist as principal investigator, several sites
and staff across the country, a better salary, and many of the accoutrements that make one
perceive a research project as legitimate. Personally, I wondered all throughout the
process whether CBR could coexist with large-scale research projects. In CBR,
community participation is often restricted to the ghostly presence of an advisory
committee (and its “terms of reference”), some sort of Noah’s Arc that contains one of
each kind—black, First Nations, queer, woman, and the like—to be “representative.”
Little or no mentorship and capacity building are offered, which often results in having
“the usual suspects” in a particular field/network sitting at the table instead of mentoring
new leaders.
In the PASS Study, the desire to enhance the quality of life of people living with HIV
“down the road,” manifested presently in complicated and costly ways of retrieving data.
Furthermore, one of the original intentions of finding out the positive developments on
the lives of HIV-positive people on anti-HIV drugs got thwarted by the biomedical
insistence of quantitative research in finding patterns within an adverse event
framework—whatever positive we had to report about our lives risked being lost in the
numerical shuffle. The central data-collection instrument, a survey, was built primarily to
test four reporting mechanisms: 1–800 phone line, fax machine, postage-paid mail, and
one-on-one interviewers or focus groups with Aboriginals.31 It included sensitive
questions about adverse events when using anti-HIV medications (including
Public acts 36
prophylaxis). The discreet set of statistics derived from the PASS survey will probably be
seen as the legitimate result of this research venture. Yet I smuggled in sociological
explanations to make those numbers explode, to underline how arbitrary they are in the
absence of rich ethnographic data. Sociological explanations open spaces for polemic and
controversy; numbers, in contrast, do not seem to lie.
The intimacy of advisory committees in specific network research—HIV/AIDS-
related or other—is often ghostwritten in the research reporting. This is done to appease
mistrust in institution-based researchers and, worse, in funders and other bureaucrats who
often fail to understand the value of the “drama” the intrigue, and the haphazard qualities
of CBR. In my view, these arrangements end up looking more like incest than
“community-building” and thus, they are silenced and made invisible. Traditional
scientific-research interest (e.g., legitimacy by emphasis on objectivity and detachment)
prevails over the murky fieldwork elements that tend to be discounted as eccentricities
and to remain in the periphery.
Tracking “the movements of desire” as a motivating force in largescale research may
be daunting. It may seem almost unnecessary—what’s desire got to do with it? However,
as I documented in my doctoral work, desire tends to ghostwrite the becoming and
coming undone of research. In general, in the face of shrinking budgets for AIDS work in
Canada, many community-based organizations embark on large-scale research, probably
thinking that this will cement their reputation and secure both legitimacy and further
funding. They work in reference to conventional epidemiological research and disregard
the explanatory power of intimate kinds of CBR.32
To conclude this case, the large research structure and effort to have a national,
representative sample and the grand quantitative effort do not seem commensurate with
the modest goal of finding out which reporting mechanism was favored by respondents.
Moreover, the scope of the project seemed too ambitious for a national group to
undertake as a community-based project. The inherent alliances and rivalries among
national and local HIV/AIDS organizations played an unacknowledged role in the
research process, and the lack of process evaluation contributed to making invisible the
ways in which we made choices for venues, roles, funding, and data collected.
My doubts of whether CBR can be undertaken as national research are unresolved. In
this and other research projects, I have seen the community-based interests of non-profit
organizations—although increasingly in control of the research process and its
products—hindered by a faithful adherence and compliance to scientific procedures and
analysis that are not culturally appropriate for nonmainstream communities. Our betrayal,
in my view, is our repeated inability to reclaim our research goals as primarily
community based, not institution based. Community-based research, I suggest, is science
at the service of community interests. The desire to implement research that can be
perceived as legitimate in the “major leagues” translates into a betrayal of the necessary
intimacy of CBR.
MANIFESTO: YO SOY LA MALINCHE
There is no earth-shattering news here. Drama is/must always be present in social science
research and it is more visible in intimate settings such as CBR. Drama remains intensely
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Didn’t the same thing happen with Susan Bradley’s boy? Didn’t they
have to go an’ live out in Jersey, cos she couldn’t stand it no longer?
You know it as well as I do.
Janet (Defiantly). They went away ’cos he was always gettin’ sick.
Mrs. Ransome. Of course he was always gettin’ sick—with all them
devils makin’ fun of him—an’ makin’ his life a misery. Didn’t we used
to see him goin’ down the block—with the tears runnin’ down his
cheeks—an’ all of ’em yellin’ names after him. Just think of the baby
you’re goin’ to have. D’ye want that to happen to your baby? D’ye
want them to make its life a misery—same as the other one?
Janet (Lifelessly). They wouldn’t.
Mrs. Ransome. Of course they would. They’ll tease an’ torment it,
just like the other—an’ when he’s old enough to understand—who’ll
he blame for it? He’ll blame you for it. (Inspired) He’ll blame Bob for
it—he’ll hate him for it. D’ye want your boy—Bob’s boy—to be hatin’
his own father? What’d Bob say? What’d he think of you—ruinin’ his
baby’s life—an’ all just because you’re obstinate an’ won’t listen to
reason. Can’t you see it? Just think—if you’d only say you was in the
wrong—an’ do what Mr. Tanner asks you—he’d forgive you an’ make
everything all right. Oh, Janet—can’t you see it? Ask him—beg him!
Janet. Oh, dear. Well—how c’n Mr. Tanner make it all right?
Mrs. Ransome. You know what I mean. Oh, Janet, it won’t take him
a minute to write it. If he don’t, can’t you see it’ll ruin us all our
lives?
Janet. Only a minute to write it—or it’ll ruin us all our lives.
Mrs. Ransome. Oh, Janet, this is your last chance. Tell him you’re
sorry. (To Tanner, who has edged towards the door, and is about to
leave.) Oh, Mr. Tanner, please don’t go. Just wait another minute.
Tanner. Really, I must go.
Mrs. Ransome. Oh, sir! I can see she’s sorry. You won’t go back on
your word, sir?
Janet (Unwillingly feigning remorse). Let me think a bit. Oh, Mr.
Tanner, I suppose I’m in the wrong—if you say so. It didn’t seem to
me to be wrong—that’s all I got to say. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m
sorry for the way I spoke—and what I done.
Tanner (Returning). My child, it’s not for me to forgive you. I knew
I could appeal to something higher in you, if you’d only listen to me.
Are you truly repentant—from the bottom of your heart?
Janet. Yes, sir.
Tanner. As I said to your mother just now, I don’t like preaching
sermons, but I hope this has taught you that there can be no
justification for our moments of passion and wilfulness. We must all
try to humble our pride and our spirit. I won’t go back on my word,
but when you start out afresh you must try to wipe out the past by
living for the future.
Janet. I’ll try to, sir.
Tanner. And now, Mrs. Ransome, I suppose I’ll have to make the
entry as though it had happened an hour or so ago. I know I may
seem soft-hearted about it. But I feel I am doing my duty. This may
save your daughter from a life of degradation. I think the end
justifies the means. But first, let me ask you, who knows that the
ceremony wasn’t performed before he died?
Mrs. Ransome. Only me—an’ her father—an’ my sister outside.
Tanner. Can she be relied upon to hold her tongue?
Mrs. Ransome. She surely can, sir.
Tanner. Well, you understand this is a very serious thing for me to
do. If it becomes public I shall be faced with a very unpleasant
situation.
Mrs. Ransome. Oh, I promise you, Mr. Tanner, not a soul will know
of it. We’ll take our dyin’ oaths, sir, all of us.
Tanner. All right. But first let me lend your daughter this prayer-
book. (Takes prayer-book out of pocket; addressing Janet.) Here’s a
prayer-book, Miss Ransome. I’ll go with your mother now into the
back-parlor, and meanwhile I want you to read over this prayer. Try
to seek its inner meeting. Come, Mrs. Ransome, you can carry the
register, and we’ll come back later and discuss the funeral
arrangements.
Mrs. Ransome (Takes the marriage register). Oh, Mr. Tanner, I don’t
know how to thank you.
Tanner. Well, Mrs. Ransome—I shall expect your husband to send
us something for our new mission to spread Christianity amongst the
Chinese.
(Exit Tanner and Mrs. Ransome. Janet closes the door. She walks
towards the couch, looks at the prayer-book, then at the couch. She
flings the prayer-book to the other end of the room, smashing some
of the ornaments on the mantle-shelf, and throws herself upon the
side of the couch, sobbing wildly.)
Slow Curtain.
“The Immutable”
Margaret C. Anderson
I n a world where flippancies arrange an effective concealment of

beauty there are still major adventures in beauty to be had
beneath the grinning surface. One of them is the discovery of
those rare persons to whom flippancies are impossible—those
splendid persons who take life simply and greatly. Several months
ago I tried to write an impression of Emma Goldman, from an
inadequate background of having merely heard two of her lectures.
Since then I have met her. One realizes dimly that such spirits live
somewhere in the world: history and legend and poetry have
proclaimed them, and at times we hear of their passing; but to meet
one on its valiant journey is like being whirled to some far planet
and discovering strange new glories.
Emma Goldman is one of the world’s great people; therefore, it is
not surprising to find her among the despised and rejected. Of
course she is as different from the popular conception of her as
anyone could be. The first thing you feel in meeting her is that
indefinable something which all great and true people have in
common—a quality which seems to proceed on some a priori
principle that anything one feels deeply is sublime. Then a sense of
her great humanity sweeps upon you, and the nobility of the idealist
who wrenches her integrity from the grimest depths. A terrible
sadness is in her face—as though the suffering of centuries had
concentrated there in some deep personal struggle; and through it
shines that capacity for joy which becomes colossal in its intensity
and tragic in its disappointments. But the thing which takes your
heart in a grip, and thrusts you quickly into the position of the small
boy who longs to die for the object of his worship, is that imperative
gift of motherhood which is hers and which spends itself with such
utter prodigality upon all those who come to her for inspiration.
Emma Goldman has ministered to every kind of human being from
convicts to society women. She has no more idea of conservation
than a lavish springtime; and where she draws courage and
endurance and inspiration for it all will remain one of those
mysteries which only the artist can explain. A mountain-top figure,
calm, vast, dynamic, awful in its loneliness, exalted in its tragedy—
this is Emma Goldman, “the daughter of the dream,” as William
Marion Reedy called her in an appreciation written several years ago.
“A dream, you say?” he asked, after sketching her gospel. “Yes; but
life is death without the dream.” In that rich book of Alexander
Berkman’s, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, she is given a better
name. “I have always called you the Immutable,” is the way the
author closes one of his letters to her. And this is the quality which
distinguishes Emma Goldman—a kind of eternal staunchness in
which one may put his fundamental trust.
This is the woman America has hated and persecuted, thrown into
jail, deprived of her citizenship, and held up as an example of all that
is ignorant, coarse, and base. America will recognize its failure some
day, after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the
new war has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which
Emma Goldman has been pleading for during her years of fighting.
But it takes education to produce such awakenings, and there is no
immediate hope of such a general enlightenment. The stupidity of
the situation regarding Emma Goldman is that other prophets have
raised their spears to the same heights and have been
misunderstood or ignored but not outraged by the peculiar
ignorance which Americans alone seem capable of. Had Ibsen
appeared among us to lecture on the rightness of Nora’s rebellion or
to denounce the pillars of society as he did in his writing, he, too,
would have been thrown into prison for free speech or accused of a
president’s assassination. The cruelty of the situation regarding
Emma Goldman is that she has so much work to do which so many
people need, and that she cannot break through the prejudice and
the superstition surrounding her to get at those dulled ones who
need it most. Ten years ago she was preaching, under the most
absurd persecution, ideas which thinking people accept as a matter
of course today. Now the ignorant public still shudders at her name;
the “intellectuals”—especially those of the Greenwich Village radical
type—dismiss her casually as a sort of good Christian—one not to be
taken too seriously: there are so many more daring revolutionists
among their own ranks that they can’t understand why Emma
Goldman should make such a stir and get all the credit; the Socialists
concede her a personality and condone her failure to attach herself
to that line of evolutionary progress which is sure to establish itself.
“Unscientific” is their damning judgment of her; her Anarchism is a
metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a
scientific temperament. And so they all miss the real issue, namely,
that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times
which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction, and—
this above all!—that life in her has a great grandeur.
How do such grotesque misconceptions arise? Why should it have
happened that all this misapprehension and ignorance should have
grown up about a personality whose mere presence is a benediction
and whose friendship compels you toward high goals you had
thought unattainable? There is no use asking how or why it
happened; it is a perfectly consistent thing to have happened, for it
happens to everyone, in greater or less degree, who strives for a
new ideal. But if I could only get hold of all the people who are
unwilling to understand Emma Goldman and force them to listen to
her for an hour:—what a sweet triumph comes with their “Oh, but
she’s wonderful!”
And now about her ideas. If you have read Wilde’s Soul of Man
Under Socialism you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s
Anarchism. What is there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It
is merely the highest ideal of human conduct that has ever been
evolved. Well, it is possible to get even the prejudiced to admit this
much. Nearly everyone can see that government in its essence is
tyranny; that one human being’s authority over another is a
degrading thing; that no man should have the power to force his
neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that punishment is a
prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to take the life
of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is really
misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who
should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who
have not found their work; that people who work should have some
share of their production; that the holding of property is a source of
many evils; that possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities;
that co-operation and sharing are splendid ones; that there should
be an equality between giving and taking; that nothing worth while
was ever born outside of freedom; and that men might live together
on this basis more effectively than on the present one. Even your
“reasonable” man will grant you this premise; but then he plays his
trump card: It may all be very beautiful—of course it is; but it can
never happen! Oscar Wilde answered him in this way: “Is this
Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not
worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which
Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks
out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization
of Utopias.”
Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank
and file of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her.
“But you are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I
am not,” she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon
individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my
hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort
so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method
of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law.
Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that
we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving
freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great
responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American
founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil
seemed to become a necessity. In her remarkable book that has just
been published, Voltarine de Cleyre discusses this phase of the
matter brilliantly in a chapter called “Anarchism and American
Traditions.” There is no possibility of going into it minutely here,
except to ask those who insist upon regarding Anarchism as an
unconstructive force to read it.
These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does
not expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so
the facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable
humor of a communistic society might save their wit for more
legitimate provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the
consciousness of those through whom such changes will come—to
improve the individual quality. It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion,
at the time when he fell deliriously in love, that all the problems of
society could be solved on that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s
dream prophecy—his prediction of the time when there will be
neither monogamy nor polygamy, but simply a poetogamy under
which people may live freely and beautifully.
And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to
crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of
curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make
their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by
the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few
who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is
the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same
time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to
imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big
out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role
which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its
hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy
and Nietzsche and Kropotkin; to have seen her friends, her nephews
and nieces offering her their high adoration; to have watched her
gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous flinging away of self on every
possible pretext; to have listened with her to great music in a kind of
cosmic hush that music is made by and for such spirits; to have
heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal she cherishes and how her
expression of it has been so far below her dream; to have compared
her, an artist in life, as incapable of spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a
Beethoven, with a sensitiveness which makes her almost fear
beauty, with a sweetness that is overwhelming—to compare her with
the vulgarians who denounce her is to fall into a mad rage and long
to insult them desperately. I said before that Emma Goldman was
the most challenging spirit in America. But she is so much more than
that: she is many wonderful things which this article merely touches
upon, because it is impossible to express them all.
Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression of our ignorance.—
Maeterlinck.
Poems
Maxwell Bodenheim
Expressions of a Child’s Face
Dawn?—no, the stunted transparency of dawn—

Color taken from the birth of a white throat
And shaken in a still cup till it gradually reaches strength
A sudden scattering of strained light—
The smile has lived and seemed to die.
Thought?—no, the invisible shudder of a perfume

Trying to leave the shadowy pain of a flesh-flower
A whisp of it whips itself away,
And leaves the rest—a cool, colorless struggle.
Sadness?—no, the growth of a pale inclination

Which knows not what it is;
Which tries to form the beginning of a swift question,
But has not yet developed trim lips.
And then what seems a smile

But is the sleeping body of a laugh.
It almost awakes, and throws out
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.
Emotions
I
His anger was a strained yellow wire.

You leapt into it thinking to snap it,
But it flung you off silently.
II
Her happiness was too apparent—

Pleasant flesh in which you sensed heavy blood-clots.
III
Veering, weary birds were her hatreds.

They rested on you for years,
Then circled away, still weary.
IV
Her sorrows were clumsy, black bandages

Which seemed to hide wide wounds,
But only covered scratches.
To ——
You are a broad, growing sieve.
Men and women come to loosen your supple frame,
And weave another slim square into you—
Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.
People fling their powdered souls at you:
You seem to loose them, but retain
The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.
To Handpainted Chinaware
Distorted ducks, smirking women and potshaped blossoms

Fastened to pale plates, you are dreary symbols of those who
painted you.
O ducks, you were made by women
Who sway in and out of the waters of life,
Content to catch morsels of food from birds flying overhead.
And you smirking women, were painted by men
Who unrolled little souls on plates,
Gave them faces which could not quite hide their ugliness ...
You alone almost baffle me, potshaped blossoms—
Were you fashioned by childless women, who made you the infants
Denied them by life?
Study of a Face
Her forehead is the wind-colored, sun-stilled wall of a country
church.
Trailing cloud-shudders overhead narrow it to a thin band of vague
light:
Two tarnished, exultant cerements of earth—cheeks—meet it,
And the three speak clearly, languidly.
An Old Man Humming a Song
Life was a frayed, pampered lily to him—

A lily which still clung to his gray coat,
Like an unbidden word whitening the death of a smile.
The half-smooth perfume of it touched the slanting, cambric curtain
of his soul,
And stirred it to low song.
The Spiritual Dangers of Writing
Vers Libre
Eunice Tietjens
T he spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as

numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto
him who falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the
immediate reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates
more quickly than almost any other form of human expression when
this inner life goes astray.
There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present,
sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be
met afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and
embraces it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may
sometimes be paid and much adulation acquired into the bargain—
witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.
There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of
producing, as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of
The Little Review, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which
moves us like “the crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of
this type. On the other hand, there is the equally present danger of
becoming over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away
before the wind of human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went
that way. Then there is the danger of determined modernity, of
resolutely setting out to be “vital” at all costs and crystallizing into
mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis Untermeyer has done—and the
other danger of dwelling professorially in the past with John Myers
O’Hara. There is too the new danger of “cosmicality,” of which John
Alford amusingly accuses our American poets of to-day. And there
are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting poet must meet
and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of immortality.
But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially
virulent, that attend the writing of vers libre, free verse,
polyrhythmics, or whatever else one may choose to call the free
form so prevalent to-day. These dangers are inherent in the form
itself and are directly traceable to it. For contrary to the general
notion on the subject, it takes a better balanced intellect to write
good vers libre than to write in the old verse forms. It is essentially
an art for the sophisticated, and the tyro will do well to avoid it.
The first of these dangers, and the one in which all the others
take root, is a very insidious peril, and few there be who escape it. It
is the danger of being obvious.
In writing rhymed or even rhymeless poetry of a conventional
rhythmical pattern the mind is constantly obliged to sift and sort the
various images which present themselves—to test them, and turn
them this way and that, as one does pieces in a mosaic, till they at
last fit more or less perfectly into the pattern. This process, although
it sometimes, owing to the physical formation of the language,
distorts the poet’s meaning a little, has the great artistic advantage
of eliminating many casual first associations, which on careful
thought are found not worth saying. It is precisely this winnowing,
weighing process which the form of free verse lacks. Anything that
comes to mind can be said at once, and with a little instinct for
rhythm, is said. The result of this mental laziness is that the ideas
expressed are often obvious.
But here a curious phenomenon of the human mind comes into
play. Just as a physically lazy man will often perform great mental
exertions to avoid moving, so the mind will frequently go to quite as
great lengths to find unusual methods of expression to conceal, even
from itself, this laziness of first thinking. The result is the attempt to
cover with words the fundamental paucity of the ideas.
There are several principal effects which may result from this. One
is brutality. A conception which, if spoken simply, is at once
recognized as trite, may if said brutally enough pass muster as
surprising and “strong.” A crude illustration of this is to be found in
the recent war poetry of “mangled forms” and “gushing entrails.”
Ezra Pound furnishes the most perfect example. Another effect is the
tendency to the grotesque. This device is more successful in
deceiving the poet himself than the other, though it has less general
appeal. For it is possible, by making a thing grotesque enough, to
cover almost completely the underlying conception. Skipwith Cannéll
runs this danger, along with lesser men. A third peril is that which
besets some of the Imagistes—the danger of reducing the idea to a
minimum and relying entirely on the sound and color of the words to
carry the poem.
Still another result of the complete loosening of the reins possible
in vers libre is the immediate enlargement of the ego. It is not so
easy to see why this should result, but it almost invariably does, and
has since the days of Whitman. It usually goes to-day with the effect
of brutality. The universe divides itself at once into two portions, of
which the poet is by far the greater half. “I”—“I”—“I” they say, and
again “I”—“I”—“I.” And having said it they appear to be vastly
relieved.
The next step is to lay about them gallantly at every person or
tendency that has ever annoyed them. “I have been abused” they
say, “I have been neglected! You intolerable Philistines, I will get
back at you!” It is odd that it never seems to occur to these young
men that they can only hit those persons who read them, and that
every person who reads them is at least a prospective friend. Those
who neglect them they can never reach—and slapping one’s friends
is an unprofitable amusement.
Examples of these unfortunate spiritual results of abandoning
oneself too recklessly to the free verse form are numerous. James
Oppenheim’s latest volume, Songs for the New Age—although it is in
many ways an excellent work and deserves endorsement by all who
really belong to the new age and are not merely accidentally alive
to-day—nevertheless shows in places the tendency to obviousness
and slack work.
More flagrant examples are to be found elsewhere. Take for
instance Orrick Johns. Here are some stanzas from his long poem,
Second Avenue, which took the prize in Mitchell Kennerley’s Lyric
Year:
“How often does the wild-bloom smell

Over the mountained city reach
To hold the tawny boys in spell
Or wake the aching girls to speech?
The clouds that drift across the sea

And drift across the jagged line
Of mist-enshrouded masonry—
Hast thou forgotten these are thine?
That drift across the jagged line

Which you, my people, reared and built
To be a temple and a shrine
For gods of iron and of gilt—
Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart,

To give thee back the thrill of Youth,
To seek therein the gold of Art,
And seek the broken shapes of Truth.”
The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in Poetry a
few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are
very well shown here:
No man shall ever read me,

For I bring about in a gesture what they cannot fathom in a life;
Yet I tell Bob and Harry and Bill—
It costs me nothing to be kind;
If I am a generous adversary, be not deceived, neither be devoted—
It is because I despise you.
Yet if any man claim to be my peer I shall meet him,
For that man has an insolence that I like;
I am beholden to him.
I know the lightning when I see it,
And the toad when I see it ...
I warn all pretenders.
But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most
exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young
self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country,
has not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive
poetry, some of it very beautiful. This for example:
PICCADILLY
Beautiful, tragical faces,

Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;
And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,
That are so sodden and drunken,
Who hath forgotten you?
O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!
The gross, the coarse, the brazen,

God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,
But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,
Who hath forgotten you?
This, from Blast, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the
same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no
comment:
SALUTATION THE THIRD

Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”:
GUFFAW!
So much the gagged reviewers,
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;
These were they who objected to newness,
HERE are their TOMB-STONES.
They supported the gag and the ring:

A little black BOX contains them.
SO shall you be also,
You slut-bellied obstructionist,
You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene.
...............
I have seen many who go about with supplications,

Afraid to say how they hate you
HERE is the taste of my BOOT,
CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING.
To attempt to lay the entire onus of so flagrant a spiritual and

cerebral degeneration to the writing of vers libre alone is of course
impossible. But the tendency is clear. Fortunately, however, we are
not all Ezra Pounds and there are still poets balanced enough to
appreciate these dangers and to make of free verse the wonderful
vehicle it can be in the hands of a genius.
Union
Rabindranath Tagore
(Translated from the original Bengali by Basanta Koomar Roy, author of

“Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and His Personality.”)
B eloved, every part of my being craves for the corresponding part

of yours. My heart is heavy with its own restlessness, and it
yearns to fall senseless on yours.
My eyes linger on your eyes, and my lips long to attain salvation
by losing their existence on your lips.
My thirsty heart is crying bitterly for the unveilment of your celestial

form.
The heart is deep in the ocean of being, and I sit by the forbidding
shore and moan for ever.
But to-night, beloved, I shall enter the mysteries of existence with
a bosom heaving with love supreme, and my entire being shall find
its eternal union in thine.
War, the Only Hygiene of the World
F. T. Marinetti
(Translated from the French by Anne Simon)
I want to explain to you the difference between Futurism and

Anarchism.
Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution,
suspends its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and
before the stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields
and midst the waving of palms.
We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute
principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and
intellectual progress of Man.
We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the
different races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World:
War.
The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet
tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene
preluding the agony of the races.
The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and
economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more
than that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those
that are planted in the brain of man, and are called:
Mania for order.
The desire for the least effort.
The fanatical adoration of the family.
The undue stress laid on sleep, and the repast at a fixed hour.
Cowardly acquiescence or quietism.
Love for the antique and the old.
The unwise preservation of everything that is wicked and sick.
The horror of the new.
Contempt for youth.
Contempt for rebellious minorities.
The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and
for the dying.
The instinctive need of laws, chains, and impediments.
Horror of violence.
Horror of the unknown and the new.
Fear of a total liberty.
Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or
anarchists?... Eh bien: there is no more discouraging spectacle.
You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red
souls, is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement
independence, to give the government of their party to the oldest of
their number; that is to say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most
prudent, in a word, to the one who having already acquired a little
force, and a little authority, will be fatally interested in conserving
the present state of things, in calming violence, in opposing all
desire for adventure, for risk, and heroism.
This new president, while guiding them in the general discussion
with apparent equity, shall lead them like sheep to the fold of his
personal interest.
Do you still believe seriously in the usefulness or desirability of
conventions of revolutionary spirits?
Content yourself then, with choosing a director, or, better still, a
leader of discussion. Choose for that post the youngest amongst
you, the least known, the least important; only his role must never
supersede the simple distribution of the word, with an absolute
equality of time that he shall control, the watch in his hand.
But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and
anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great
tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate
humanity.
Genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative age.—Clive Bell.
The least that the state can do is to protect people who have something to say
that may cause a riot. What will not cause a riot is probably not worth saying.—
Clive Bell.
Noise
George Burman Foster
T here is a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the

student makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All
the great turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly
associated with violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all
these revolutions, it may be doubted whether history records any
one on so large a scale as that which confronts us under the name
of Christianity, in the transition from ancient to mediæval
ecclesiastical culture. It was not a single Crucified One that gave
Christianity the sacred symbol of its religion; unnumbered thousands
—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor lives on martyrs’ crosses.
The old culture went down in rivers of blood—not too figuratively
meant—and a new arose, or, better, was created. Now, what is true
of this most important revolution of our antecedent cultural life is
true also, in corresponding measure, of every new “becoming” in the
history of peoples. No state, no church, no social form, has ever
arisen but that the path of the new life has passed over ruins and
graves.
Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical
inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself? The
answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to persist
as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very nature. What
newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is living
pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and
that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to
call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase,
Polemos pater panton: war is the father of all things. The right to life
is the right of the strong.
In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to
whether there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set
up a different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it
not be to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the
strong? Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the
pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their
weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force
their way through life?
The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a
new culture, this Friedrich Nietzsche, is he not, then, precisely the
apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famed Herrnmoral,
master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think?
Did he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild roving
blonde Bestie was still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship
the beast of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality
of Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed
are the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek? If, now, the
word of this new prophet should make disciples, should even
revolutionize the times, should we close our churches and stop our
preaching, as the first thing to be done? For the churches preach
goodness and love, not might and dominion; see in man child of
God, not beast of prey.
If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I
would have nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory
fulminations against this man, or to advertise mitigating
circumstances for his thought, and to re-interpret the whole from
such a standpoint, until the whole should seem less brutal and less
dangerous—to do either the one or the other is not for me, but for
those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to the gayety of
nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the high debate
as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final cause of
our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn
him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our seething
times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task.
But for all that, I do believe we must penetrate much, much
deeper into this new prophet’s spirit than either friend or foe has yet
done, if we are to win from Nietzsche a deepening of our own and
our time’s moral view of life.
Would that we might forget, for a moment at least, all that
partisan praise and blame have scraped together respecting this
most modern of all philosophers; would that we might accompany
him into the most hidden workshop of his own thoughts and hearken
to the personal confessions of his wonderful soul! And what would
we hear there? This preacher of crash and catastrophe and
cataclysm, temporal and eternal, speaking of “thoughts which come
with dove’s feet and steer and pilot the world”; of “the stillest hours
which bring the storm.” Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears the Höllenlärm,
the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life itself makes; he
observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how they are
frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the truth is the
truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the storm
signifies to men that something good and great must be taking
place, some great event of history must be under way. Then
Nietzsche sets himself like a flint against this evaluation of things:
“The greatest experiences, these are not our noisiest, but our stillest
hours. It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the
inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I
speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for
which I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and
theological works. These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-
values which the majority of men today pass by—pass by more
heedlessly perhaps than ever. These great words supply us with a
criterion for the evaluation of questions of the moral life, a criterion
that no one will cast aside who once comes to see what it means. It
is a criterion without which we do not yet comprehend life in its
depths, because we so constantly contemplate things from a false
angle of vision. Something of the men who are carried away by
“hellish alarum” lives in all of us. Let there be stillness without, and
we think that there is nothing going on. Let nature peal and groan
outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to be released; then
we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power even a
divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people collide,
the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a
day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such
and such a battle a world-historical event.
But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature
when Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear
the conflict we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine
Spring-life, nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all,
weaves away inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself
the noiseless new germs of life.
Thomas Carlyle, though a trifle noisy himself at times, could finely
write: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion
themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed
and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to
rule.” Wordsworth, not unmindful of
“The silence that is in the starry sky”
yet, gazing on the earth about him, sang
“No sound is uttered,—but a deep

And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep
And penetrates the glades.”
And for Longfellow there is
“Hoeder, the blind old god

Whose feet are shod with silence.”
But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods.
Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords,
peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the
people call great. But the might and work of a people are to be
found in that quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything
outwardly—that quiet heroism to which no one can unveil
monuments in our cities. It is the inaudible battles of the heart that
this heroism fights; and the quieter it is, the more gloriously it
shines. Men with big voices and mighty lungs we hear. Their words
excite, move to tears, arouse boisterous and voluble antagonisms.
These who assemble about them such billowy mobs, we are
tempted to think that they are the leading spirits, that a vast power
must live in them, since they are so able to move inert men. But
another prophet, modern also, has said to these bawlers in market
places: “Do you think that he who stirs up scandal moves the
world?” Nothing easier than to start a scandal! Also, nothing jollier
for numerous men, to say nothing of women. But scandal is a
roaring in the ears. It does not reach the heart. It irritates, over-
irritates the nerves. It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that
sinks down into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there
of germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the
world than the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional
bawlers. Deep rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs
are dumb. A heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing
sacred to silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle:
“Under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is
better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.”
It were well to begin at home, and learn to evaluate experience
aright in our own being. There are moments in our lives when
everything that we encounter disconcerts us; nay, when our whole
being seems to be off the hinges, out of joint. Pain plows up our
innermost selves. We could shriek from heartbreak and woe. We
stand there undone. And men who see us and hear us moaning so
piteously, groaning so painfully, have the feeling: “No pain like this!”
But how mistaken they are! For there is a cry of the soul, heard of
no one, more painful than all that can be pitied or lamented. There
are labors and battles of the soul wherein nothing is hammered and
driven, and yet something new is formed. It is never so still in a man
as when he makes up his mind to have done inwardly with some
experience. As long as there is foaming and blustering within, we
accomplish nothing. True work tolerates no tempest. We must be
still. And when old values are broken, when we must lead life to new
goals, the quiet hour must come in which a divine child of the spirit
is conceived by the holy spirit; and the brightest light which we can
kindle within will burn so quietly and clearly that no cloud of smoke
shall ascend therefrom, and there shall be no flickering to bear
witness of contact with the restless world. “There the true Silence is,
self-conscious and alone.”
Behold, then, this Nietzsche, who flees all “alarum” and execrates
all din as a falsification of the moral values of life; who lives
preferably thousands of feet above the world there below, who
lingers on the loftiest lands of life whither no whirring rattle of the
day could rise! Could this Nietzsche find joy in men mauling and
making a mess of each other? Could this Nietzsche preach a culture
in which battalions in uniform should line up against those in blouse
to see who knew best how to deal the deadly blow? Could he gloat
over the field where the thunder of battle thundered the loudest?
“Inventor” Krupp’s “new noise”—would that appeal to Nietzsche who
wanted all silent save the dripping rain, and who worshipped
sunshine alone? One might answer these questions in the light of
one’s own experience. Let us suppose that we comprehend the
meaning of the stillsten Stunden, the quietest hours, and the worth
of those great happenings of which nothing reaches the newspapers,
and which no avant-coureur trumpets. Tell me, could we then detect
even the slightest inclination to be our own heralds, and to sacrifice
our quietest hours to the gaping and squabbling of men? Men—so
the old gospels say—ought not to cast their pearls before swine, or
give that which is holy to the dogs. But what is pearl, what is holy, if
not what the Nietzschean still hour contains and produces? There is
something so tender and beautiful in that hour that we shrink from
expressing it, from translating it into thought, lest word and thought
tincture its best perfume. Silence is sweeter than speech, more
musical than song. Whoever has a deep in himself into which he
alone descends and penetrates, a plus of his life that remains after
we have known and weighed all his words and deeds, protects this
deep and this plus from everything that could make a noise, from all
mere words, from all intrusive and obtrusive tittle-tattle. Sich eine
Oberfläche anheucheln, to feign a surface, to wear a mask, this is
the original and fine insight into such psychology. Man envelops
himself in unneighborliness, not to hold haughtily other men away
from him, but to save himself from them, so that they may not
clumsily finger some pearl which could not stand so rude a touch.
Why speak in parables? Because it is not given unto them to know
the mystery of the kingdom, said the Nazarene. Parables were a
protecting shell encasing the most intimate kernel, which ignorance
or awkwardness might otherwise corrupt or destroy. Nietzsche and
the Nazarene held a deep and a plus so uniquely their own that they
intentionally sought, not to be understood, but to be misunderstood,
with reference thereto.
Yes, there is a “surface” which only the man knows and uses who
bears about a deep in his own being. There, hypocrisy becomes a
protection of truthfulness; surface a protection of depth. Whoever
“feigns such surface,” wears such mask, is infinitely more honest and
veracious than he who has no silence in his deep which cannot be
speech on his tongue—a speech which is often only motions and
noises of the tongue of him who pries curiously into what he is
inwardly incompetent to understand, or offers a superficial and
voluble sympathy for griefs of which he is as innocent as a babe
unborn, or a jaunty appreciation of values and verities and virtues
for which he has never sweat even a drop of blood. To wear a mask,
to lie, lie, lie,—that is the truth of the soul as it hides its treasures
and its sanctities from vulgarity and volubility!

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Public Management and Complexity Theory Richer Decision

Reflections on Public Administration 1st Edition John

Public Finance Public Policy 6th Edition Jonathan Gruber

Encyclopedia of Public Administration Public Policy David

Handbook of Public Information Systems Second Edition

Handbook of Public Information Systems Third Edition

Changing the Conversation Messages for Improving Public

Public Universities and the Public Sphere 1st Edition

AGAINST COMMON SENSE:

edited by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco

RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

ISBN 0-203-33704-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-94839-8 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-94840-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Introduction Making Knowledge in Public: Overturning an Audience 1

Section 1. Disruptive Desires

1. Poverty, Policy, and Research: Toward a Dialogic Investigation 11

Section 2. Audiences to Participants

5. Theater Forum at the Urban Odyssey School: A Case Study 69

Section 3. Public Acts

Contributor Biographies 189

MOTHER: A photo of my girl, my daughter;

Public Acts delivers a power-packed, behind-the-scenes look at a diverse collection of

[A] more flexible way of conceiving social change, a more inclusive

Just maybe it does….

In sum, a civic pedagogy needs to work with—not avoid or deny—

…Maybe we need to remember what—and who—our public education has induced us to

But remember, always remember

This project began as an attempt to collect articles written by activist educators,

This transdisciplinary scholarship is an implicit and intimate demand for new

Melancholy is the “still life” equivalent of mourning, as melancholy leads us to create

The issue is the old stand-off between confrontation and assimilation:

NOTES ON THE RISKS OF DISRUPTIVE NARRATIVES

individuals, and communities detailed in this collection into encompassing

The paradox of striving for complete understanding is that it

To complicate matters and to document how complicated matters of public

We can disturb the taken-for-granted notion that poor

for disagreement, and so on. (Nicholas Burbules 1993, p.

THE CONFERENCE PAPER

those who are marginalized from decision-making processes that directly

educated terms is seen as threatening and domineering and …maybe…exploitive? Who

Yeatman (1998) discussed in her description of contractualist entrepreneurialism. In this

BACK TO THE FUTURE

To divide the oppressed, an ideology of oppression is indispensable. In

Community-based research is “a philosophy for inquiry and not a discreet research

volunteer—a role often overlooked—in projects or programs of investigation. From

BECOMING A RESEARCHER, BECOMING LA MALINCHE

DESIRE MADE VISIBLE/EL DESEO A FLOR DE PIEL

Desire has been conceptualized in connection with “differential consciousness”

I offer three specific examples of the desire/betrayal dialectic in CBR in an attempt to

THE CASE STUDIES

At the Dr. Peter Centre: The Displacement of Queer

Malinchismo disregards the community work of an entire generation of GLBT/queers to

In the Pridehouse: An Addiction to Drama

The PASS Study: Reflections on Minor Desire in a “Major League” Research

MANIFESTO: YO SOY LA MALINCHE

I n a world where flippancies arrange an effective concealment of

Expressions of a Child’s Face