On Inherited Responsibility: A reflection on rigour and care-full research
“For [inherited responsibility] is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground — and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question — never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me — to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”
(Oliver 2016, 57, ‘On Inherited Responsibility’)
In this essay excerpt by the beloved and oft-quoted poet Mary Oliver, she describes her response to hearing an heiress speak about the responsibility she inherited with her wealth. Oliver owns the inherited responsibility of one who cares for thoughts and ideas. She writes this responsibility includes enjoying a process of careful questioning. She has learned through her own creative practice the importance to be patient, passionate and caring with your work, and never to assume or trample.
The words from Oliver resonate with the responsibility I feel to be rigorous and full of care as a creative researcher, seeking to learn and build from the knowledges of others.
My PhD candidature is held within WonderLab, an interdisciplinary, co-creative research lab at Monash University. We come together engaged in practice-led/based/oriented research, or simply practice-x research, as one of our lab’s supporting supervisors, Ricardo Sosa, recently represented it in order to side-step the varied contentions surrounding these terms.
One of the tensions felt within the lab, and evidenced throughout several sessions in our recent two-week research intensive, is how we translate and hold our practice to the standards of rigour demanded by an academic research environment. ‘Rigour’ is perhaps a troublesome term that brings people into thinking about evaluation, hierarchy and institutional erasure. However, I would argue an important consideration of ‘rigour’ is how patiently and carefully we adopt/borrow/synthesize/appropriate ideas and concepts from other thinkers, fields and practices.
I offer this Mary Oliver quote as a way of describing a kind of rigour to which I aspire. I feel a great responsibility to treat the ideas of my great ones, with passion, patience, and care.
In an interdisciplinary research context, it has been my experience that terms, methods, methodologies and practices are borrowed and appropriated without careful consideration of the originating literature or praxis behind them, and even less regard for contemporary discourse surrounding them. The nature of our collective research engagements means we are lucky to be immersed in and communicating across diverse research practices. We are constantly exposed to different theoretical concepts and methodological approaches. As practice-based design researchers, we are eager to put these ideas into practice, with the belief that it is through practice and application we will learn and deepen.
In this environment, I have both participated and witnessed how easy casual borrowing of other people’s languages, methods or concepts can occur. These borrowed ideas then reappear in new contexts, without serious consideration of how or why they traveled, or from whence they came. Knowing this is something that can happen easily, especially when the way a term or description someone else uses particularly resonates, I want to draw attention to the danger of this casual orientation.
An example from my work that demonstrates the importance of this responsibility is the use of ‘intersectionality’. Intersectionality can be ‘casually’ used to describe how different aspects of one’s identity overlap, or intersect, to create distinct experiences of discrimination. I began to use this term to help me describe that my research project was not looking specifically at gender equity, or racial equity, or class equity, but a broader context of privilege and oppression that cuts across these different axes. Declaring I was taking an ‘intersectional’ approach was an easy way to not declare specificity within this research objective. It was over a year later I began to engage in the actual discourse of the term.
Intersectionality comes from Black feminist legal scholarship, and was originally defined in a seminal paper by Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (1989). Crenshaw discusses the failure of the U.S. legal system to account for how a Black woman experiences discrimination (namely sexism and racism) uniquely different from how Black men experience racism and white women experience sexism. She explains how the intersection of race and gender revealed the courts’ limited definitions of discrimination, and thus inability to offer protection from it. Crenshaw describes how the single-axis frameworks present in feminist discourse (gender) and antiracism movements (race) are damaging and do not recognise people with intersecting identities relegated to the ‘margins’ of these discourses, “Although Black male and white female narratives of discrimination were understood to be fully inclusive and universal, Black female narratives were rendered partial, unrecognizable, something apart from standard claims of race discrimination or gender discrimination…”
(Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 790–791).
Nearly 25 years later in a paper published by Crenshaw, with colleagues Sumi Cho and Leslie McCall, they investigate how intersectionality has developed over the years, becoming a tool for analysis, a distinct field of discourse, and a method for political action (praxis). As intersectionality travelled to fields outside law, the authors underline the importance that it is grounded in the experience of discrimination faced by Black, female plaintiffs. This discrimination was ‘illegible to courts’ (791) and also erased by anti-discrimination (feminism and antiracism) discourse and practice. Without taking care to ensure that the term and ideas within it are used responsibly, work done under the guise of ‘intersectional’ can continue to erase and displace the voices and experiences of Black women and others who are found in the margins of this work.
What a more careful consideration allowed me to learn is that being intersectional does not mean taking a broader view of discrimination. Being intersectional is about acknowledging a specific orientation to discrimination, an orientation that is focused on those left out or unable to be held within the constraints of mainstream discrimination discourses. It is not about avoiding a mainstream discrimination discourse. A research project that declares an intersectional approach as a means of avoiding specific identity axes is not the same as a research project that is focused on the way mainstream discourses centered on a single axes of identity discrimination are not able to hold those who live, ‘in the margins’.
While this might seem small, it is a wholly different orientation. In the first instance I took the word to serve my needs. In the latter, I am required to focus on how structures, not identity, create vulnerability (Crenshaw 2016) and understand how (and if) the research is attending to the lived experience of those who are marginalised by single-axis discourses. As intersectionality continues to travel (in the form of discourse or praxis) there is a responsibility to hold the idea with care. The ease of simply saying, ‘I am taking an intersectional approach’, without the necessary engagement of understanding the context out of which intersectionality was borne, and how and why it has travelled is not simply a lack of academic rigour. It is irresponsible and can serve to perpetuate the very erasure that intersectionality is calling to account.
Deeper engagement with the discourse, and how it applies to what my research is exploring feels like a more responsible and respectful way of engaging with ideas across disciplines. The lesson for me is that I should not pick up a term, an idea, a methodology and own it in a way to suit my purposes, but be honest about what I’m doing and how that relates, or does not relate, to the ideas and work of others.
In design discourse we often work with interdisciplinary terms or ideas. Intersectionality is an example of one term that has traveled and put down roots in many different disciplines. I recognise we cannot become experts in every theory, method or methodology we use in our practice. Doing so would mean we never end up engaging in our own practices, but are simply relegated to reading and citing others’ work. However, I would argue we must slowly, patiently and seriously engage with new ideas, terms and ways of working, and not treat them with casual adoption. This is important whether working with methodologies such as ethnography or participatory action research; theories such as decoloniality or queer theory; approaches to research such as Indigenous ways of knowing and going or embodied and somatic knowledges.
This is not to meet some external criteria of quality and academic rigour, but it is an inherited responsibility of our interdisciplinary curiosity. A responsibility to be patient and careful with how I use language and ideas, how I recognise histories and trajectories, and how I honour and situate my work in relation to my ‘great ones’, and my own community. To use language casually, to pick up a new idea and fold it into my work without further investigation feels careless and irresponsible.
REFERENCES
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (June 2013): 785–810. https://doi.org/10.1086/669608.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–168.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Kimberlé Crenshaw: On Intersectionality.” Presented at the WOW: Women of the World Festival, Southbank Centre, London, England, March 14, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=-DW4HLgYPlA&feature=emb_logo.
Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Select Essays, 2016.
