Identity, ethnography & queer communities
What a radically inclusive church taught me about empathy & research.
This is based on a talk I gave at UX Australia 2015.
As a Social Anthropology student at university I undertook an ethnographic research project of a radically inclusive “gay church” (the Metropolitan Community Church), initially to understand the importance of religion to a community whose identity is at odds with traditional religious beliefs. My own identity as a queer, agnostic/atheist researcher meant I was initially focusing on the wrong questions. Couple that with trying hard to remain a passive observer, resulted in distancing myself from my own identity and experiences, which meant I risked losing the connection I felt to the community.
When writing this I had to stop and ask myself, how personal do you want to get? Because you’re basically coming out to strangers, which is new for me..
But this story is personal. It’s a story about what I identify as and the commonalities that that had with a community I was studying. I couldn't separate myself from that part of me for this, as I couldn't for my research, which led to an interesting personal dilemma as a researcher that had an impact on my project. I learnt a lot about conducting research in general, the difficulties of researching a minority group, & researching a group that you personally connect to on some level. I know this may not very often be the case for ethnographers or uxers, but it was an important learning experience for me that helped me grow my skills as a researcher, but also helped me learn more about the queer community & I learnt a hell of a lot about the importance of empathy.
But let’s not talk about me for a second. What do you identify as? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you finish the sentence ‘I am…’?
I crowd-sourced this with friends and family and got answers that massively varied. When you think about it, your identity can include your nationality, race, job title, family role (father, mother, partner — or wife or husband if you’re lucky enough to have that legally recognised..), religion, political affiliation, class, personality trait, gender or sexual orientation…or anything else. We’re all more than one thing so I imagine it’s not the simplest task to finish the sentence ‘I am..’ for the majority of us. There’s plenty of things that I identify as, and being queer and a part of the queer community is a big part of that.
When thinking about it, I wondered whether we identify strongly with one part of ourselves when that part is a minority group? I’m certainly protective of it, personally, and I think that’s probably because we can still expect the reaction to be largely negative.
Now, if people aren't sure about the use of the term queer, I personally use it as a reclaimed umbrella term to reference all gender and sexual minority identities. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to say than LGBTIQA+. Not everyone in the community would agree with me on that so it is a personal preference.
The Identity Project by Sarah Deragon, who kindly let me use her photos in my talk, explores the huge variety of labels people within the queer community use to describe themselves, which was in itself another eye-opener for me into how identity is so uniquely personal.
So identifying as queer is one part of me, an important part, but I'm not defined by it and others cannot completely understand my experience of being it. We naturally identify ourselves into some or many identities, identity is fluid and changing and personal, and we’re hard to sum up in one word. Here lies the danger of categorising people or groups of people into one rigid, conforming set, as it sets up expectations. Which is exactly what I did.
I imagine anyone who does any kind of ux or ethnographic research remembers their first research project. It’s awkward, uncomfortable, there’s so many things you’re trying to remember to do and not do while still ‘being present’ and getting the most out of the conversation and keeping the conversation natural and flowing and your body language right and taking note of their body language…it’s exhausting. And terrifying. And a great learning curve.
So, I was 19 and had just starting my second year of university studying anthropology, and I was doing an ‘Ethnographic Methods’ course where we had to put all the theory and methodologies into practice by conducting a research piece on a local community. This course asked the students to just ‘go do ethnography. Go study a community’. No objective, no questions to be answered, just choose a group of people and see what you find.
Now, to give you some context, I was studying in Brighton, England, which is both the gay capital of Europe and also the most secular town in the UK. I’d heard of this radically-inclusive church which was established and run by queer Christians so naturally, I was intrigued, it was apparently thriving and I wanted to know why. So my group and I got permission from the church to sit in on their Sunday services and to chat to anyone who was happy to chat to us. There were normally 40–50 regular attendees, of all ages.
I personally sit somewhere between agnostic and atheist (everything’s a spectrum!), and right off the bat I was struggling to figure out why religion, a religion that traditionally tells us that our ‘choice’ and our ‘lifestyle’ is a sin, was so important to these people that they felt the need to establish their own church. Wouldn't you abandon those beliefs?
But after sitting as part of the congregation and interviewing people that attended, I realised that this was bigger than that. That yes, personal history, tragedy in some cases, and beliefs were a part of why this community was so active in such a secular area, but that doesn't encapsulate the entire experience of being a member of that church. Talking to individuals there about their experiences, they would focus on being a part of a community, and through observing the people, their interactions and the sermons, I realised the focus was on the present. On being there, with friends, families and their children.
Looking back on that project, I realised that I had walked into it with a bunch of questions I wanted answers to. I was focused on the religion and wanting to understand the congregation’s experiences in “traditional” churches, and what led them there. I had stumbled at the first hurdle of research because I hadn't allowed myself to go in open-minded. I was so focused on the do’s and don’t of ethnography that I completely ignored the fact that I should have been thinking about the bigger picture, and I should have spent my time there as naturally as possible. I also made assumptions about their experiences before I had spoken to any of them, because I felt that I identified with them on one level.
So, what did I learn?
Think about how you identify, and think about why that is and what that means for your experiences. As researchers and uxers we’re problem solvers, we want to make things better, but the core of being able to do that is to be able to understand what the problem is and how it affects people. There does come a point where you have to accept that you can never truly walk in someone else’s shoes, but accepting your own limitations, and understanding your own cultural and cognitive biases will help remove some of those assumptions you might make.
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you”
Because I failed at a lot of things with this project, it is the one I refer back to when I'm planning and facilitating research sessions. I learnt that you need to spend longer with people to help build trust, and to help you see where you should start focusing. If I went back, I’d want to talk to people outside of the church setting, to learn more about each person individually. I’d facilitate more of an open dialogue, rather than focusing on the few questions that I thought I wanted to get answers to.
When researching, it’s important to keep in mind that we shouldn't be jumping straight into solution mode. We shouldn't have predefined ideas of the problem, and try to gather as much information as possible about as many things as possible, because to start with, it’s all relevant. When you've done enough to find patterns, then you can start to drill down. There is always more to learn and more to discover than we think there is, so be open to that possibility and connect with people and their experiences.
