‘Participatory Action Research (PAR) is characterised by some as an archetypal modernist political project concerned with liberating marginalised and exploited subjects’ (Cameron and Gibson, 2005:317). I did not, however, simply want to present the people at KPC as marginalised exploited subjects, nor did they see themselves in this light. There was no assumption of a hierarchy of knowledge between the researcher and the ‘objects of study’
on my part.
According to the traditional view of ideology, people are exploited and oppressed because they don’t know the law of their exploitation or oppression. They have wrong representations of what they are and why they are so. And they have those wrong representations of their place because the place where they are confined hinders them from seeing the structure that allots then that place. (Rancière, 2009:275)
This point of view is one that researchers involved in participatory research also dispute;
self-reflexive PAR has articulated the ‘barriers to participation’ (Pain and Francis, 2003) and the ‘tyranny of participation’ as a research method (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). There have been positive outcomes from these critiques, which point to the useful contribution that post-structuralism has made to PAR (see Cameron and Gibson, 2005; Reason and Bradbury, 2001). The poststructuralist contribution to PAR helps us avoid the epistemological standpoint that Rancière criticises in the quotation above, in which inequality is assumed from the outset, presenting inequality as a temporal issue, where the endpoint (equality) is moved towards over time as people become aware of how things really are. Rancière has been vocal in his critique of Bourdieu. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière, 1991) and The Philosopher and His Poor (Rancière, 2004), he sets out his concerns with Bourdieu’s approach: Rancière suggests that Bourdieu’s work begins with a presumed inequality, in contrast to Rancière’s axiom of equality. Bourdieu’s analysis assumes that the unequal division of capital between social groups appears as an explanation of inequality, whereas Rancière’s argument is that some individuals do not succeed because their discourse is not recognised or ‘heard’. I argue that a combination of these processes take place in order to marginalise some individuals in society.
This concern, regarding temporality and equality, reiterates Rancière’s main criticisms of Althusser; the opposition of science to ideology and theorists pretending to ‘speak the truth’ about what is practised by social and political actors (Rancière, 1999). This helps us
understand both the epistemology of research methods and how poststructural critique can inform academic research. The debates between the modernist, structuralist approach and the post-modern, poststructuralist approach are resonant in the debates between Bourdieu and Rancière: Rancière, taking a poststructuralist – or I would even argue anarchist ontological – position to inform his methodology, and Bourdieu taking an ethnographic, but nonetheless self-reflexive, approach to research.
Other authors also corroborate Rancière’s critique: ‘aren’t the likes of Althusser and Bourdieu complicit in staking out a certain distribution of proper places?’ (Bowman and Stamp, 2011:95). Authors have argued that Rancière’s ‘challenge begins when we ask:
what happens when a worker or intellectual refuses to know their place’ (Highmore, 2011:95). Bourdieu’s work has been widely criticised for being ‘deterministic’ and ‘set in a world where things happen to people rather than a world in which they can intervene in their lives’ (Jenkins, 2002:91). Some literature in the past has ‘had the effect of aligning Bourdieu in the minds of many Anglophone geographers rather too directly with Anthony Giddens’ ‘structurationist project’’ (Painter, 2000:248). However, I argue that contentious political movements are inherently structural and have a ‘structural focus’; ‘they are rooted in and seek to transform relatively enduring sets of social relations’ (Bagguley, 1992:42).
Furthermore, for Bourdieu, ‘conflict is built into society’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 19), and it should be appreciated that ‘it is struggle, not ‘reproduction’, that is the master metaphor at the core of his thought’ (Wacquant, 1998:215-229). I would argue that, most importantly, Bourdieu’s habitus and field are relational, as set out in the previous chapter; thus, I believe that radical, progressive potential can be attributed to these ideas.
According to Bourdieu, the task of sociology is ‘to uncover the profoundly buried structures of the various worlds which constitute the social universe, as well as the
‘mechanisms’ which tend to ensure their reproduction or their transformation’ (Bourdieu 1989:7). Rancière fundamentally criticises this in two ways. Firstly, he criticises the understanding of sociology as ‘the science of the hidden’ (Pelletier, 2009a:139). He comments on the unfalsifiable nature of Bourdieu’s sociological claims: ‘if science is thought of as constituting the world rather than understanding it, the problem of how to account for a ‘ruined’ research practice or ‘partial’ truths, is removed’ (Pelletier, 2009:280). Rancière attributes Bourdieu’s epistemology to a structuralism that sees the world as ordered by symbolic structures that deny agency to certain agents. According to Rancière, ‘there must be no mixing, no imitation’ (in Bourdieu’s representation of the
social). The subjects of this science are like ‘the warriors of [Plato’s] Republic’ and must be ‘unable to imitate anything else than their own dye’ (Rancière, 2004:189). This critique is important to my approach: I wanted to avoid coming into the project with a set of prejudices, and instead I will constitute the participants as ‘speaking beings’ (Rancière, 1999), as statements should not be checked against a presumed given or empirical reality but on the basis of what a proposition brings to presence. Consequently, emancipation should not be thought of in terms of possessing ‘reflexive knowledge’; rather, it is related to changing the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière , 2006).
Secondly, Rancière does not focus on Bourdieu’s methodological validity or reliability, but rather he rejects the performative function of Bourdieu’s work which, Rancière says, enacts the very inequality it claims to refute. This critique links to the issue of performativity in my own research method. Bourdieu would see power as ‘a commodity that can be redistributed’, but poststructuralist theory (and Rancière) would see power as
‘an effect: an action, behaviour or imagination brought into being in a specific context as the result of the interplay of various communicative and material resources’ (Kesby, 2007:20).
In Rancière’s’ own work he takes a ‘method of equality’ (2009) which can be instigated
‘by identifying those times and spaces where equality declarations might be manifest and made into political practice’ (Davidson and Iveson, 2014:7). This method can be enacted by the researcher through identifying times and spaces where the subjects are not normally designated by the police order: for example, the working mother who occupies her community centre to protest closure by the state. Such events, where people speak and act outside of their given place in society, are the occurrence of politics according to Rancière.
Therefore, in my attempt to locate the contradictions, unusual coalitions and political identities at KPC, I am enacting Rancière’s ‘method of equality’. Rancière’s ‘method of equality’ is useful, as it enables academic work to draw the line of escape, the line of universalisation ‘when the poor romantic floor-layer meets the aristocratic philosopher of antiquity and verifies that they have something in common’ (Rancière, 2009:282).
However, this standpoint is also very researcher-centric; Rancière uses the above example from his early work – Proletarian Nights, mentioned in the previous chapter. From this work, he bases his positionality as a researcher; however, I would argue that his work is not grounded in the messy empirical reality that is the field. Thus, I would argue his
method lacks a sense of grounded messiness that is always entailed in fieldwork, especially any sort of participatory approach that aims to go beyond observing from afar.
No matter how epistemologically reflexive and systematic our fieldwork is, we must still speak as mere mortals from various historical, culture-bound standpoints: we must make limited, historically situated knowledge claims. By claiming to be less rather than more, perhaps we can tell stories that ordinary people will actually find more believable and useful. (Foley, 2002:487)
There was another level of reflexivity on my part, as I was taking part as an activist alongside the volunteers, but I was also carrying out a research project investigating the very act of doing this; crossing the boundaries between the spaces of activism and academia is inherently problematic (Kitchen and Hubbard, 1999:196). Maxey (1999) explicitly states that the ultimate responsibility for his research rests with him and that he will benefit from it more than anyone else will. He goes on to explain that this fact makes trying to define relationships and responsibilities within his research as problematic (Maxey, 1999). I too had many conversations with people at KPC about the role of academic research; and my field notes mention these conversations, which made an impact on my positionality. Lindsay openly discussed a time when he felt misrepresented by an academic that had written about a direct action campaign that he had been involved in the past. Whilst my participation was welcomed at KPC, my identity as a researcher or academic was something I actively wanted to ‘play-down’; I tried to avoid conflating my personal identity with my research, primarily adopting the role of a volunteer. I did not want my personal political views to inform my actions at KPC so much that I was unable to participate in anything outside my preferred political persuasions; this point is crucial, as KPC is a community centre and not an anarchist social centre. This means that the pragmatic approach often has to dominate the political project, as I explain in Chapter 6.
There was notable suspicion from some people at KPC about researchers and academics;
and this awkward reality was something that led me to be self-reflexive, even highly critical about my personal role as a researcher. I experienced similar grounding realities as felt by Chatterton et al (2010), sometimes feeling that some activists saw academics and researchers as ‘exploitative, unaccountable, managerialist, and compromised by our academic status’ (ibid:251). Emily, a worker at KPC, also openly discussed funding for academic research, asking the question: ‘how is there money available to carry out
research on community groups like KPC, but no money for the groups themselves?’
(Emily). I empathised with her concerns on this issue, yet pragmatically had to accept my position as a funded PhD student, but our friendship provoked many other interesting questions regarding the role of the academy. Although tensions and contradictions such as these were sometimes aired, I was happy that people at KPC felt comfortable enough to discuss honestly these issues with me. Such moments of ‘agonism’ actually led to very productive conversations and interviews with people and a set of friendships from the community centre that continue today.