Qualitative- intersectionality and critical race theory and transformation

Question 1

Research is never neutral- some questions to ask

Answer 1

• why was the research topic chosen?
• which research projects pass ethics committees and which don’t- and why?
• who funds the research?
• which findings are made public?
• whose values are promoted?
• who benefits from the research?
• who evaluates the research?

Question 2

How is research political?

Answer 2

it advances a particular agenda

-it silences particular topics and promotes certain interests

Question 3

Power in research enterprise

Answer 3

• who dominates research institutions?
• who is promoting knowledge?
• higher educational institutions historically dominated by white men
• under representation of working class people in academia

Question 4

Who’s voices are heard and who’s are silenced? - in Psychology

Answer 4

• research is historically male-centric, heterocentric

- the gender of theory

Question 5

Who’s voices are heard and who’s are silenced? - in feminist research?

Answer 5

• earlier feminist scholarly work written by white privileged feminists about the issues of white privileged women
• the experiences and struggles of women of colour fell between the cracks in feminist AND anti-racist discourse.

Question 6

How does research maintain and reproduce (class/gender/racial) stereotypes?

Answer 6

Research on stigmatized issues:
HIV/AIDS, intimate partner violence, street based sex work.
-usually conducted using samples drawn from disadvantaged and marginalised populations.
-financial compensation may be incentive
-wealthier populations are more difficult to access due to private service providers

Question 7

What does the drawing of marginalised samples do?

Answer 7

The invisibility of privileged groups and the over-representation of the poor and marginalized in research means that social problems such as HIV and violence is being represented as a problem of the poor and disadvantaged.

Question 8

What is reflexivity?

Answer 8

Practicing reflexivity means acknowledging and reflecting on how the researcher’s own presence may affect their research at every stage of the research process.

It is understanding that the researcher brings to the research process their own social Identity, fears, anxieties preconceived ideas and expectations… and that these matter.

Question 9

Questions you might ask yourself in terms of reflexivity

Answer 9

Why did I choose this particular topic to research?
How do the questions I ask my participants influence what my findings will be?
How is my social identity (age, class, race, gender, sexuality, occupation, level of education) different or similar to that of my participant?
How does this affect the relationship which I establish with my participant?
How does this relationships affect what I find in my research
What preconceived ideas did I have about my participants?
What did I expect to find through my research?
How did this affect my research findings?
What pre-conceived ideas might my participants have of me
How did this effect how they behaved and what they might have said during interviews?

Question 10

The research context

Answer 10

Macro: in the context of post-apartheid SA, in the context of UCT under-graduate residences

Question 11

Interview-Participant relationship

Answer 11

-Two people in an interview process will always have “multiple and
specific identities that shape how the process takes place and, ultimately how the text gets developed”. That is to say, research is “a continuous dialogue between the interpreter and the interpreted”

Question 12

Reflexivity is about the Secrets and Silences

Answer 12

Reflexivity is about acknowledging the dynamics at play within the research - often not spoken about or explicitly stated in the research reports.

How often do you read about the identity of the researcher in quantitative studies?

Does this identity still matter? YES!

Question 13

3 types of standpoint methodologies

Answer 13

1. feminist research
2. anti-racist scholarship
3. critical race theory

Question 14

STANDPOINT METHODOLOGIES: 3 central premises

Answer 14

1. seek to uncover or critique hidden or disguised relationships/ideas/power dynamics
2. commitment to working in interests of oppressed and disadvantaged groups of people
3. generally aimed at producing change (research-activism)

Question 15

Historically Blackness and Black knowledge was constructed as:

Answer 15

• “primitive”, “uncivilized”, “pre-literate”
• Banthu education
• exclusion from universities, science etc
• racial discrimination rested upon ideological premises of difference and superiority

Question 16

Principles/stages of Black scholarship

Answer 16

1. disillusionment
2. reactive engagement (criticising white research assumptions, challenge eurocentrism)
3. constructive self definition (advocating an African world view in research and preserve cultural norms and traditions, African presence in research)
4. Development of emancipatory discourse (promotion and respect of African values)

Question 17

Black/African Scholarship

Answer 17

• is unapologetic about African humanism and often prioritises it over so-called scientific objectivity.
• respects other kinds of knowledge and belief systems outside of ‘objective science’ (eg traditional healers)
• research is conducted for benefit of the masses, not individual gain
• research is a communal process (PAR)
• invested in promoting socially relevant research
• problematises the construction of race
• problematises the relationship of race to economic and discriminatory practises

Question 18

The politics of racial identity

Answer 18

• the racial categories of whiteness and blackness do not exist outside the colonial encounter and are mutually dependent terms:
• -the apparent superiority of whiteness requires systematic devaluation of Blacks.
• -blackness is predicted on the fact of not being white.

the colonial encounter is pathological because it causes psychological disturbance by appropriating the means and resources of identity

Question 19

What is feminism?

Answer 19

• a theory and practise
• study of gender relations and women’s oppression
• form of collective action with the aim of unseating oppressive (gendered) power relations

Question 20

Liberal Feminism

Answer 20

• concerned with equal rights and opportunities for women.
• Women’s oppression stems from a lack of equal opportunities and from legal restraints
• areas of concern:equal pay and equal rights
• approach has limmited capacity to enact radical social change by challenging the system that support and maintain women’s oppression.

Question 21

Marxist/socialist feminism

Answer 21

• argues that women’s oppressions are rooted in capitalist economic system.
• see women’s economic dependence on men as the key source of oppression.
• want to show that domestic labour contributes to women’s lack of participation in public sphere= results in their continued dependence on men

Question 22

Radical feminism

Answer 22

• rooted in gay rights movement
• women’s oppression stems from system of patriarchy
• see marriage and family as examples of how patriarchy maintains women’s subordination
• women should end patriarchy through their shared identity as women

Question 23

Post-structuralist feminism

Answer 23

• call to attention to how language (man as rational, woman as irrational) is imbued with power and has a role in othering
• Post-structuralist feminism uses post-structuralist theories of language, meaning and subjectivity to theorise gender relations
• goal=developing understandings or theories that are historically, socially and culturally specific and that are explicitly related to changing oppressive gender relations.
• challenges the idea of a fixed identity- identities are fluid
• real nature of male and female cannot be determined
• gendered subjectivity is socially constructed
• We are subjected to dominant discourses but also active subjects who resist dominant discourses - performativity
• the body is a site for inscription of masculinity and femininity

Question 24

Post-structuralist feminism- the split subject

Answer 24

the subject is fragmented, woman/man are not unitary categories: multiple intersecting identities

Question 25

Post-structuralist feminism- agency

Answer 25

the subject both actively re-inscribes and resists dominant constructions of self

Question 26

Black/African feminism

Answer 26

• emerged as a result of dissatisfaction with civil rights (dominated by men) and feminist movements (white women) in the USA.
• calls attention to the experiences of black women in a racist capitalist patriarchy.
• Black feminists argue that the experiences of black women could not be sufficiently understood or theorized by traditional white feminism.
• It is also concerned with the experiences of women in postcolonial contexts.

Question 27

Intersectionality

Answer 27

• Intersectionality draws on the idea of the interconnectedness of multiple identities & experiences
• How these identities & experiences relate to power & social-structural oppressions
• Intersectionality as a feminist tool for social critique and activism

Question 28

Intersectionality & the critique of feminism

Answer 28

• Emerged out of second-wave black feminist critique in early 1970s in the US
• Most feminist scholarship focused on concerns and interests of white, middle-class women
• Not naming whiteness and middle-class-ness – naturalising and generalising the concerns of white feminists to black women and feminists

Question 29

one story of US feminist movements (white)

Answer 29

1. First wave: Feminist Empiricism (late 1800s-early 1900s- women’s suffrage, property rights and smash myth of gender difference)
2. Second Wave: Feminist Standpoint (1960s and 1970s- overthrowing patriarchy, women’s experiences as separate to men’s)- the beginning of black feminists being vocal about one sidedness of white feminist movement
3. Third Wave: Feminist Relativism (1990s- critical of scientific inquiry, beginning of intersectionality)

Question 30

Problems with the Additive approach

Answer 30

• Essentialises social identities
• -There are ‘correct’ ways of belonging to a group, e.g. Black means X
• -Ignores complex and different ways of belonging
• People’s experiences are not separate in real life
• Issues with ‘ranking’ oppressions

Question 31

What is intersectionality theory? (3 elements of theory)

Answer 31

• black US feminists: Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw
• 1. Axes of Identity
     
     2. Social Structural Oppressions
     3. Matrix of Domination

Question 32

Matrix of domination

Answer 32

• arrangement of social structural oppressions

- structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, interpersonal

Question 33

Structural Domain

Answer 33

• Law, religion, political system, economy
• For example: apartheid government system
• Slow to change: wars, revolutions

Question 34

Disciplinary Domain

Answer 34

• Exists to manage oppression
• Bureaucratic organisations; institutions
• Racism, sexism & other oppressions hidden behind “efficiency, rationality, equal treatment”
• Collins’ example: University system
• Change through insider resistance

Question 35

Hegemonic Domain

Answer 35

• Makes the oppressions legitimate
• Consists of language, images, values & ideas
• Examples: TV, other media, what we are taught in school, religious teachings
• Change through critique & self-re-education

Question 36

Interpersonal Domain

Answer 36

• Our personal relationships & daily interactions
• “How am I upholding the oppression of another?”
• “How am I upholding my own oppression?”
• Example: xenophobia, heterosexual women who discriminate against LGBT persons

Question 37

example of intersectionality research

Answer 37

• Simply including women and people of colour in research
• Studying demographic difference, comparing different social groups
• Choosing an identity to focus on

example:
Black women who experience abuse – more likely to experience depression & PTSD
=Leads to potentially stigmatising groups
This is NOT Intersectionality research
rather…

Black women may be more susceptible to depression and PSTD – police fail to intervene, loss of income etc.

Question 38

Intersectional analysis

Answer 38

“Interpret this individual level data within a larger sociohistorical context of structural inequality that may (or may) not be explicit or directly observable in the data”

Question 39

Changing Consciousness

Answer 39

• Offering new knowledge about experiences
• Understandings why things are the way they are.
• “Revealing new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality has far greater implications” (Collins)

Question 40

Changing Social & Economic Institutions

Answer 40

1. Oppressions work together (matrix of domination)
2. Unification of social movements would lead to massive social change
3. examples: strikes, service delivery protests, student movements.