BARRERAS DE APRENDIZAJE Y PARTICIPACIÓN

In embarking on a research journey, a scholar usually aims to produce research that will be beneficial and useful for people or things. However, how does one

characterize useful research? For whom should research be useful? And how does one suppose to undertake useful and critical research? These kinds of questions always emerge during the phase of designing a piece of research that aims to go beyond producing knowledge and a mere exercise in scholarship. In answering these queries, I draw from literature on scholar activism and follow the Autonomous Geographies Collective’s (2010) definition of scholar activism as an activity that seeks to align one’s academic work with political ideas: “to further social change and work directly with marginal groups or those [engaged] in struggle” (p. 246). Derickson and Routledge (2015) define scholar activist as a person who engages with “theoretical and conceptual questions in ways that are always insistently and dialectically rooted in the struggles of everyday life” (p. 2). The adoption of positionality as scholar activists is usually driven by the scholars’ deep emotional responses to the social and ecological injustices and inequalities and the desire that motivate them to politically engage in social struggles (Derickson and Routledge, 2015). In adopting positionality as a scholar activist, I have found it useful to examine the work of geographers Gibson-Graham (2005, 2006, 2008) who emphasize the notion of hopeful geographies and Routledge & Derickson’s (2015) concept regarding the politics of resourcefulness. The work of these geographers have guided this research and informed the ethos of my personal attempt to undertake hopeful and critical geography research. Routledge and Derickson (2015) identify three ways of practicing the politics of resourcefulness. The first way is to commit to advancing the work of our collaborators through the resources that academics are often granted through their position. Examples of this are specific expertise related with writing and research, technological innovation and time management, and access to donors. The second way is to design research that examines questions and addressing concerns that are also in the interest of our collaborators. The third way is to design research that addresses the challenges that our collaborators face in their struggle to pursue progressive changes and identify conditions that will sustain their social movements. In conducting this research I practiced the first and the third ways of performing the politics of resourcefulness, as I will discuss further in the section below on researcher’s positionality.

Gibson-Graham are known as scholars who actively advocate the need for academic research to go beyond criticism and to start thinking about alternatives and hope (Gibson-Graham, 2005, 2006, 2008). This is difficult in the sometimes tense REDD+ research environment in which a multitude of discourses regarding neoliberal natures circulate, including the not-quite-neoliberal approach discussed in Chapter 1. However De Freitas, Marston and Bakker (2015) remind scholars to recognize the dynamism and tension that shape the particularity of neoliberal nature in a different contexts. This dynamism and tension can possibly be utilized by actors, such as activists, to serve their interests (de Freitas, Marston and Bakker, 2015). I am interested in responding to Gibson-Graham’s call for hopeful research by, in addition to critically exploring the uneven effects of REDD+ neoliberal rationalities, to also focusing on how the neoliberal agenda in REDD+ can be resisted and repurposed.

Following Gibson-Graham’s (2008) suggestion, I have navigated the research to adopt a “weak form of theory”. Accordingly, I see the practice of using theory, as not being about forecasting failure and validating impossibility, but instead it is about seeing possibility and opportunity. According to Gibson-Graham (2008, p. 621), practicing weak theory can open new perspectives in seeing power as “a differentiated landscape of force, constraint, energy, and freedom” that is useful in producing political possibilities. In performing weak theory in a piece of REDD+ research, I resist the urge to jump into a premature judgement by labelling every REDD-related activity as the extension of capitalist interests. I perform what Gibson- Graham (2008) define as “a reparative motive that welcomes surprise, tolerates coexistence, and cares for the new” (p. 619). Following Robbins’ (2011) advice, I undertook this research as an attempt to go beyond merely describing a “hatchet” by also recognizing “seeds” in performing critical yet hopeful research. This is a practice Gibson-Graham eloquently state as being the need to read “for difference rather than dominance” (p. 623).

Performing a hopeful and critical geography research was not a straightforward task. It is a commitment that involves careful consideration of how one is involved in

producing knowledge and struggling against injustice (Castree et al., 2010). Taylor (2014) suggests that a scholar activist’s positionality is “performed, fluid and changing” (p. 307, see also Askins, 2009). Indeed, positionality is socially constructed and shifts according to the change in power relations (Gibson-Graham, 1994). In the section further below I will reflect on performing the positionality of a scholar activist and discuss the multiple challenges that I encountered both during the fieldwork and when I was completing research analysis and writing. In the subsequent section I will discuss the research method employed in this study and detailing the data collection method as well as the three case studies that underpinned this critical inquiry.

3.3 Multi-sited and Multi-Scalar Critical Inquiry: