When it’s the right moment to leave the room: An interview with Julia Cardoni, member of Halo Network.
Part of our purpose at Halo Ethnographic Bureau is to start a conversation about the craft of research. It takes a lot of training and field experience to make a good researcher. That’s why is so important to share experiences in different professional settings.
I talked to Julia Cardoni, project manager at MUVA Mozambique member of Halo network, about her experience doing research with underprivileged urban young people in Mozambique, human-centered approach, and the importance of developing soft skills to create a safe space to facilitate interviews in challenging contexts of research.
What kind of challenges you and your team face on a daily basis doing research in the context of underprivileged urban youth in Mozambique?
During my time working as project manager for MUVA, a DFID-funded program for women’s economic empowerment in urban Mozambique, I came across many situations that tested our team’s ability to navigate through the uncertainties and unpredictabilities of research. In Mozambique, girls are not encouraged to pursue formal education and professional training. Instead, they are raised to perform domestic labour. Although the majority of families in contemporary Mozambique wish for girls to stay in school, if they happen to find a suitable husband who is capable of paying the “lobolo”, the bride price, that is considered to be an ideal outcome of their upbringing.
At MUVA, we conduct all sorts of studies on social issues related to the young population of urban Mozambique, such as gender inequality, teenage pregnancy, youth employability, and substance abuse. In this particular social context where gender roles are very well defined and restrictive, it is a challenge for any researcher to create a safe space of dialogue in which women can feel safe to share their opinions about the world around them.
Especially for Mozambique women, who are not in touch with their own individuality and do not foresee a very wide horizon of possibilities, to even talk about wants and desires is difficult. Many of them lack reflexive repertoire to distinguish elements of their own sense of self.
Was there a pivotal moment in which you became much more aware of these subtleties of interaction with women in Mozambique?
There was an episode during research. We were trying to interview young women about their professional hopes for the future. One participant came with her father to the interview, and the team soon noticed that the presence of relatives would be constant during that particular research.
The silence in the courtyard. The emptiness around. The fear of speaking what should not be said to those who do not deserve to listen. Two people sitting, a young female participant being interviewed by a researcher. Her father roaming around in courtyard at a distance, but with some effort, he could listen to parts of their conversation. For each and every question, she responded with brief answers, making for a rather dry, monosyllabic interview.
That particular scene that I described earlier became ingrained in my mind. More than reflecting about the craft and the ability required to do research in challenging social and cultural contexts, that image made me think about the kind of technical resources we have at hand to handle sensitive situations.
How it is possible to create a safe space for sharing in challenging contexts of research?
I think the answer begins with an even more fundamental moral inquiry into our own motivations and ethical commitments in the field. Before anything, I would rather ask myself: How can one become a person who deserves to listen?
Doing fieldwork in environments of traditional gender norms demands that the researcher cultivates a refined sensibility to engage with participants, knowing how to read and interpret subtle nuances of behaviour, and navigate sensitive topics of conversation. Perhaps one of the most critical situations is the one that requires the researcher, faced with insurmountable silence, to realise what is the right moment to shut up and just leave the room.
That takes guts and soft skills.
Do you think a human-centered approach to research in innovation and design contexts really respond to these kinds of demands?
Nowadays, human-centered approach is being recognised as an effective design tool to implement and manage social projects, as well to search for innovative solutions in the private sector.
The idea of a human-centered approach is not only valuable but praisable. However, if we fail to address issues related to challenging contexts of research, it hard to imagine that human insight will be really put at the centre of innovative processes.
There are many tools and alternatives that can facilitate the process in order to have inclusion, engagement, and collaboration throughout research.
What is missing from most guidelines and protocols is the need to develop soft skills: adaptability, empathy, critical thinking, resourcefulness. That enables the researcher to really dive and extract the kind of data that wouldn’t be available without deep connection in the moment of the interview an also to know when it’s the moment to pack gadgets and leave the room.
You can easily find an excellent variety of games, cards, visual activities among other techniques to involve people in the collaborative construction of knowledge to design projects, products, and services.
Yet, to promote real engagement in the co-creation of social solutions we needed to further demystify human-centered approach and add extra doses of honesty and respect for each encounter we have with participants.
What do you think it’s missing from training when it comes to producing a more refined approach to research?
Considering data only the individual’s way of articulating and responding to our research questions will not satisfy our quest for solutions to concrete problems. Sometimes, silence speaks louder than words. We need to be able to reflect on the context as much as we analyse the content of an interview. That’s why having an ethnographic perspective is so important. It makes us see interviews as part of a process of interaction that involves nonverbal communication and cultural signs.
My argument here is for less sticky notes and more sensibility.
Despite the amount of very well-crafted tools and approaches designed to increase collaboration and inclusiveness in research, nothing is more valuable than exercising our condition of being an “unimportant person” in the context of research in which we operate.
We need to become that person that deserves to listen and we can only do that by placing the participant’s subjective demands before our own. Only in this way, we’ll have a shot at accessing perceptions, opinions, and the logic of unfamiliar social environments.
Julia Cardoni is a social scientist and anthropologist focused on the study of alternative market circuits. Since 2017, Julia is a project manager at MUVA, a DFID-funded program for women’s economic empowerment in urban Mozambique. She is currently designing an acceleration program with gender lenses for small and growing business from the slams of Maputo to identify approaches in which the private sector could become a vehicle for women’s economic empowerment. Follow her on Instagram @juliacardoni.
