This thesis makes use of overlapping, established frames of theoretical and methodological reference i.e. critical race theory, intersectionality, feminism and disability studies, to investigate and illuminate the lived experience of Irish Travellers with impairments. Irish Travellers with impairments are a population group who have not been subject to situated, internal or self-reflexive analysis. My situated position as a member of this demographic, identifying as an Irish Traveller with an impairment, is crucial to both my authority as a researcher and to the research method itself. The chosen methodology for this thesis is critical social research. An important precondition of this is the belief that the lack of respect, rights, and formal recognition historically awarded to Travellers by the Irish State, cannot be
overlooked or ignored as a backdrop to the research presented in this thesis. As Harvey (1990: 5) points out “[such] questions are addressed in terms of historically specific sets of social relations and as such cannot avoid political issues.” This is a natural outcome when the approach taken to the questions is both critically theoretical in a broad sense and personalised or subjectivised in an intimate sense, located in the life of the individual. It critically
interrogates and evaluates phenomena. Neutrality is neither achievable nor desirable.
I am a disabled Traveller activist who has first-hand knowledge of racism and ableism. I am not a disinterested researcher. In recognising the methodological inadequacies of her own work, Pat Drake (2010) notes that in a research environment that is also political, the researcher’s neutrality is not achievable. My role as insider researcher is bound up with political and cultural nuances. These philosophical positions are in and of themselves by the very nature of activism imbued with emotions such as rage, anger and selective objectivity. Acknowledging these emotions and the absence of neutrality, this research seeks to empower the community being analysed, a community where discrimination and social exclusion are well documented experiences of everyday life [see Section 1.2]. It seeks to shine a light on oppressive structures and by doing so help to challenge and change that reality.
As a Traveller I understand how Travellers have inbuilt strategies to avoid racism, such as passing. When participants tell me that they are not passing to disavow their Traveller identity but simply ‘letting the police or institution come to their own conclusions as to their Traveller status’, I immediately understand as I too have used this strategy to avoid racism. Research participants say, ‘you know what I mean’ or ‘you know I can’t answer that’.
An insider researcher’s inbuilt knowledge has many advantages. However, assumptions of shared knowledge are not without dangers. Lauren J Breen (2007) points out that the interview process is complicated by respondent assumptions that the researcher already knows the answers. In this dissertation for example the respondents might elide unpleasant parts of their experiences because as a member of the community I would already be aware of them or they might only refer to them indirectly. One can argue however that a researcher from outside the community would be even less likely to elicit responses to ‘shame’ and ‘pride’. Diane Reay (1996) identifies another danger of insider research, that of over identification with your own issues in the interviews. She suggests this can lead to a rejection of those parts of interviewee narratives that don't match your own. This can of course lead to the privileging of narratives. On this point, while the participants in my research were Travellers with impairments, my life and theirs are radically different. Their responses to specific questions and circumstances moved through a sway of diverse opinions. One or two of the participants would ask me if I ever hid my Traveller ethnicity? That question came from a place where they may have felt ashamed or embarrassed at revealing themselves to another Traveller. Clearly there is mutual judging between the insider researcher and the participant. In the case of this study, this may be due to a need to mutually affirm each other’s identity, circumstances, reality and Traveller ethnicity because as a community we are constantly judged by the settled community for not measuring up to their standards of personhood or citizenship. Questions of integrity and objectivity commonly arise within the perspective of settled, non-disabled viewpoints.
Viewpoints, which though apparently neutral, in fact privilege the settled Irish perspective.
As a Traveller with an impairment, I have had access to interviewees from an insider’s perspective. This approach means that throughout the argument the thesis moves between established theoretical and methodological frameworks drawn from academic study, and the intimate and situated experiences shared in interviews. This involves both comparative
considerations between the experiences of Travellers, people with disabilities and other ethnic minority groups, and between contexts and cultures, and specific, local, contextualised
interactions with interviewees. In other words, it moves from generalisations to specificities. Additionally, in several interviews, the ‘enhanced rapport’ with interviewees due to my insider status as a researcher, was self-evident (John Hockey, 1993). Participants showed a tendency to identify with me, rather than feeling I was attempting to identify with them. Participants frequently noted, at various points in the interview process, that they had only consented to undertake the interview itself on learning of the researcher’s identity:
“First, I was suspicious, like talking to settled people about private things. But then when you said who you were and that you were disabled, I felt proud then.”
“Yeah, I’m disabled. I’m handicapped. That’s how my family call it, but I just say disabled. Like you, I have what you have.”
“I can tell you because you know things, but you know how Travellers are.”
In one instance, at the end of an interview, my subject voiced a particular anxiety which many participants may have felt in discussing private matters with me: “Are you sure no-one will see this? Are you really a Traveller? Do you have a settled man?” Her concern, primarily, was whether the identity and interests of the interviewer aligned with her own, a concern which is well founded when one considers the negative media portrayal of Travellers in Ireland. It is, then, possible to argue that the content of these interviews could not have been generated, nor generated so thoroughly, by a researcher who was not also an insider i.e. a Traveller with an impairment.
My faith in this approach, then, is based on personal experience in interview, but also shares with Coulthard (2014) a suspicion of any kind of essentialism. I do not mean to suggest that my identification with the group, as a Traveller with an impairment, grants access to some essential insight or essential identity. Coulthard argues that concession to essentialism can happen even where a researcher is determined not to homogenise a group or works consciously with a social constructivist model, insisting that cultures are composed from within, by their members, not from above. Even such a constructivist approach can inadequately address the social relations contributing to and worsening cultural practices in their true complexity. What this amounts to is, once again, over-emphasis on the indigenous, or minority group, a lack of awareness of the ways in which this group must interact with the dominant group or the state and apportioning complexity and responsibility solely to the group:
“[When] constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can
serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticisms ought to mitigate’
(Coulthard 2014: 21)
The essentialism Coulthard (2014) warns against here is not one generated, then, from within, in a constructivist sense, but one projected onto the minority group by an outside researcher who is predisposed to look for stable identifiers of otherness and difference. Thus, my insider status as a researcher, is realistically a means of guarding against any easy concession to essentialism.
As a group, Travellers with impairments have not been subject to situated internal, or self- reflexive analysis. This caused me to reflect on my privileged access as an insider researcher. Insights by writers, such as Coulthard (2014), Breen (2007), Reay (1996), Hockey (1993) and Harvey (1990), on ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ status were helpful in that regard, reminding me to be cognisant of my insider status and the advantages and disadvantages it confers.