Eve Ewing and Eve Tuck on Community Based Research

Eve Ewing’s methodological and theoretical approach to community-based research in Ghosts in the Schoolyard (2018) and Eve Tuck’s argument on the need to reframe community-based research as desire-centered rather than damage-centered in “Suspending Damage: a Letter to Communities” (2009), struck me as compelling considerations for my future research endeavors. Ewing’s organization of her research and systematic consideration of her methods and position create a helpful model for structuring a project that is sensitive to similar concerns. Tuck’s analysis is widely applicable for considering existing scholarship, future projects, and one’s own internal conceptualization of personal damage, desire, and theory of change.

            I want to reflect on Ewing’s research as a way of imagining my work at Cooperation Jackson and raising potential dilemmas. Her four-pronged approach combines participant-observation, secondary-source historical research, analysis of a radio archive, and semi-structured interviews. Through this combination of methods, Ewing attempts to “tell a story, rather than the story,” (Ewing, p. 174). I want to think about how her selection of research methods supports this goal, especially when it comes to working as “a boundary sitter,” (p. 175). Ewing describes the experience of observing from the boundaries as similar to experiencing Motley’s Nightlife. Working from the periphery, one is able to observe details and interactions often overlooked or behaviors and dynamics that unfold outside intimate interactions. However, the observer must choose to direct their focus to particular behaviors. Ewing’s conceptualization of participant observation highlights the necessarily impossible task of telling the story because the research method while offering a wider picture and range of possibilities for stories, requires the researcher to hone the scope of what they witness.

            The positionality of the witness is important to this endeavor. Ewing’s nuanced understanding of how her own experience in the Chicago Public School system, past connections to Bronzeville, and physical presentation affected the ways in which she was able to conduct research within the community helped me think about how to constructively analyze your own subject position. It is a disciplined acknowledgment of the position of the researcher and all it contains (the impossibility of “full reciprocity”; the understanding of being born in, but not “being from the South Side” (p. 176-177)), followed by an earnest assessment of the self that does not apologize for perceived shortcomings. I want to take this kind of assessment seriously as I prepare to do research in a place where I have no prior connection or relationships besides what the UDL offers. Shedding of unproductive guilt will certainly open up less restrictive space for engaging earnestly and equitably with the community.

The significance of witness/testimony in the creation of “collective memory” in Ewing’s work and the broader “oral tradition of Black English” brings in some of the ideas in Tuck’s piece. Participant observation and witness/testimony both have the potential for damage or desire oriented truth-telling. How can research methods be adapted in order to reflect a theory of change? Ewing’s list of questions is one place I noticed this work being done. When Ewing asks, “If you could be in charge of what Bronzeville would look like in ten years, what would you want the community to be like? What are your dreams for the community? Would you raise your family here?” or “What would you like the (closed school) building to become?” she is not only shifting the framework of her own analysis, she is establishing a record for local community members to imagine and preserve their aspirations or desires for their neighborhood (p. 185).

Overall, I found Tuck’s piece compelling. However, perhaps due to the area of history I am drawn to working in or my own personal belief system, I didn’t find the idea of desire-centered research exceptionally novel. That is, it won’t change a lot about how I think about history and theories of change. Especially at Cooperation Jackson, where organizers and community members are actively working towards black liberation and economic determination, and are grounded in a history that recognizes damage and violence but subscribe to a theory of change that sees history as progress and, ultimately, revolution, desire is undeniably a part of the conversation.

I want to think about Tuck’s question, “What can research really do to improve this situation?” (Tuck, p. 423). I imagine my participant observation could help mediate, record, and preserve conversations on the process and challenges of the imaginative work that goes into a praxis of desire. Tuck writes about how desire can allow for a healthy multiplicity: “Within collectivity, recognizing complex personhood involves making room for the contradictions, for the mis/re/cognitions, usually in an effort to sustain a sense of collective balance” (p. 421). At Cooperation Jackson, activists are undertaking an enormous task. The solidarity economy coupled with other, what some would call utopian, attempts to live and produce outside the normal logics of capitalism must generate innumerable contradictions. Learning to hold each contradiction and live in a way that recognizes and allows for complexity will be a major struggle. This summer, I want to find out just how members of Cooperation Jackson work towards and “sustain a sense of collective balance” amongst the contradictions while I also endeavor to do the same. Hopefully having these conversations will aid the organization in the long term and also provide useful information for other groups who encounter similar trials or wish to embark on their own radical journeys.