Techniques for thinking and working with people
Methodology Series | Reflexivity in Design Research
- Critical Practice: Asking, ‘Whose Design knowledge and I holding space for?’ and drawing from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color feminisms.
- Me and Reflexivity in Design Research: Meaning, how I, as part of the Black, People of Color community, work with people.
Me and reflexivity in design research
Beginning to define a critical practice lets me work out working principles and an attitude for the project I do through this research. By defining me and my reflexivity as I do design research, it lets me be active in my thinking, writing, and doing with people — in other words, how the attitude I take on manifests itself as technique.
As I work out the way I want to do the four scenes of the case project, I intend to be careful about how I ask questions, be a guest in a person’s home, document the stories people share, analyze and interpret them, and share it back to them and with others. I intend to do it all in a way that honors and actively prioritizes their wisdom about themselves (being reflexive about how I interpret and compliment their stories with literature, or how I move in their home space, for instance) and is responsive to the power dynamics in the space (online, between us in the room, with the camera, etc.). Tony E. Adams and Stacy Holman Jones, in Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer, Theory, and Autoethnography, name “the heart of a critically reflexive approach to research, [is] an approach in which a researcher “acts as an agent of change.” For me, that change is in how design researchers, and those doing similar work who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer, Trans, Non-Binary People of Color, do their work with other Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer, Trans, Non-Binary People of Color.
As I continue to work with people for this project, specific questions come up that demonstrate the kind of reflexivity I’m thinking about so far. Most are at the stage of being questions, and I’ve found literature (writing, videos, communities, etc.) to pull a couple of my questions closer to being responses and techniques. I intend for this series of questions to grow and get refined, while always aiming to use the collective set of questions and explorations of them to define what my reflexive practice looks like.
1 | Recruiting
How might I allow individuals to self-identify whether they are aligned with and fit the subject of this project (or not)?
How might an invitation be and feel personal and meaningful while also naming risks and boundaries?
2 | Being in the home
How might I account for the power dynamics in the room as a guest? What might my gestures and movements be as I am invited and step in? As I set up recording devices? As I sit down and ask questions? As I meet other people in the space? As I leave?
How might I account for the power dynamics in the room with a camera’s gaze?
In conversation at The New School with bell hooks, Arthur Jaffa declares,
If you point a camera at black people, on a psychoanalytical level that camera is also functioning as the white gaze even if a black person is behind the camera. So I said, ‘I’m just not going to point a camera at people at all.’ … It’s about surveillance … and the whole idea that the way power is structured, it always drifts upwards… presumably going to be a representative of white power… We can’t very much go forward with this whole idea of never pointing a camera at black people… I want to privilege the idea of black people being able to speak freely.
3 | Analyzing objects and stories
How might I examine the physical features of these objects and the stories as all-encompassing as possible?
How might I be slow enough to sit with any nuanced ways of knowing or hauntings that an individual shares with me? Or that I sense?
4 | Sharing
How might I transgress the walls built up by institutions to make it difficult or impossible for people to access the knowledge-producing that happens in universities?
As an explicit part of my reflexive practice I set up an online publication that cuts my academic writing up into smaller articles and shares personal writing related to Our Everyday Forms on medium.com.
In the publication is a Free Library that includes all of the articles and book chapters I’m reading in a google drive folder. In the article about the Free Library, I write about my participation and access to all of this academic knowledge:
All of this knowledge and ideas sit on private websites that require the general public and even institutions to pay hundreds of dollars for the knowledge and ideas. Or it sits in university libraries that require student or staff log-in to access it. Even if you do have access to university libraries, to get physical copies of things you need to go on campus then go into the building, you need to show valid I.D. to an security officer, and know how to navigate the university space. Being able to take each of these steps requires an extreme amount of privilege that’s not accessible to the average person. This is not an accident. It is a designed process that dictates who gets to see and work with this huge body of knowledge that is academia and benefit from it financially. I benefit from being part of this institution, and I don’t want to blindly participate in this practice. I’d love to be able to take what I benefit and leave it open for anyone to take.
How might I distribute the benefits (for instance, what’s considered credibility in some circles, personal connections, being global, etc.) from the privilege I have of being in and having access to academic institutions?
In addition to the Free Library, I’m a part of a Facebook Group that sets up a system where people who don’t have institutional access can request those of us who do, articles and book chapters they’re interested in. It’s an extremely active and responsive group that interacts multiple times daily.
How might I write and tell stories in a way that’s honest, sticks to writing specifically for, and benefits fellow Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color?
In this paper, I used a lot of citations about Black American or African American experience. I am and will make sure not to conflate or claim that the Black American experience is other Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color experiences. My Blackness is Asian. It is Japanese. And my Americanness is Japanese and Black and Senegalese. Black experience is where my attention has been for the past couple years which is why, at this point I’ve had more time and literature to pull from and branch out from things related to Black experience. I hope to, in equally a balanced and complicated way, bring ways of knowing from each and all of the axes of my identity and more into my work.
What voice might I use when I write about myself, shared stories, and others’ stories that are not mine?
Tony E. Adams and Stacy Holman Jones, in Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer, Theory, and Autoethnography, write, “What a reflexively queer autoethnography adds up to, just stories, texts that tell and don’t tell about ‘bodies literally affecting one another: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought’ (Stewart, 2007, p.128).” … “The autoethnographic means telling a story about how much we — children and parents researchers and subjects, authors and readers — worry about fitting in, about normal, about being accepted, loved, and valued. The queer means … having the courage to be fluid in a world relentlessly searching for stability and certainty. The reflexive means understanding the way stories change and can change, recognizing how we hid behind and become inside the words we speak and writing the possibilities created by our means and modes of address.
Quashie’s use of “us” to say “blackness is always supposed to tell us something about race or racism.” is problematic in that “us” really means non-black people. My work is about standing in who I’m speaking to and who I’m not. Lumping myself and other Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color into an all-encompassing universal “us” or “we” meaning broadly white supremacist, patriarchal, elitist ways of being, is another way to erase people including myself from my own story.
