Foundations of Presenting

The work of a pragmatic fieldworker is also done through written and spoken words. Presenting includes varied forms of representation, including writing, performing, teaching, training, and speaking. Presenting is done in the fieldworker’s various communities. Presenting warranted assertions need not be done when the research is over. In fact, Dewey (1941) combines inquiry and truth, and makes the case that knowledge can never really be disconnected from the process of inquiry. As such, speaking in the midst of a research project is not to be frowned upon. Rather, speaking with certain knowledge after a project is over is to be regarded with skepticism. 

Presentation of ideas is not merely a matter of scholarly elicitation. Researchers have an ethical obligation to speak. To know about an issue but remain silent often plays into unjust social conditions. Speaking also has transformative power on the researcher. Just as performance can alter a person’s relation to the knowledge he or she performs (Jones, 1997, Spry, 2011), a pragmatic fieldworker will often internalize realities of his or her work as he or she presents it. Ultimately, presenting ideas provides resources for action and invitation into inquiry.

Foundations of Gathering

Because pragmatic fieldwork is ultimately a community enterprise, gathering becomes a key practice. Pragmatic fieldworkers must gather people and resources for knowledge and action. People must be brought together in order to know together. Part of producing knowledge means gathering people. Academics are very familiar with a form of community gathering called the literature review. The academic community is diffused over both time and space, a community reality enabled by information technology (like writing and high speed internet). Gathering the writings of one’s academic community girds the practices of nearly all academic traditions. The pragmatic fieldworker can also try to gather other stakeholding knowledge communities. Facilitating connections between relevant communities lies at the heart of pragmatic fieldwork. 

Gathering people and resources also enables action. Material resources, like funding, food, and meeting places get taken up by mission-driven people. This means recruiting volunteers or staff, writing grants, and running fundraisers. Gathering creates the social and material conditions that constitute community.

Foundations of Envisioning

The work of creative democracy is, in fact, creative. Imagination is not a child’s playground, but rather, it is one of humanity’s most powerful and primordial forces – to author worlds of the mind. Critique has limited pragmatic value if it is never followed with generative envisioning of better possible worlds. Envisioning has both organizing and scholarly ends. Vision can alter the flow of organizational life. 

It can also produce models and schema that gird theory. In addition to generative imagination, envisioning also involves planning. Planning is often required to transform social conditions. Based on observations, experiences, and imagination, planning structures ideas in a way that makes them easier to convey and more likely to be put into practice.

Foundations of Reflecting

Data generation and action do not flow between each other unmediated. The pragmatic fieldworker must reflect in order for the two to inform each other. Reflecting is the analytical partner to envisioning. The two mental processes work together to produce the inner world of social change. Reflecting is also key for transforming lived experience into theoretical models. As for pragmatic fieldwork, the method highlights the meaning-making power of intentional reflection. In a way, because of Dewey’s fusing of truth and inquiry, the act of reflection becomes just as valuable as knowing. 

Reflecting is also pivotal for sorting out practice-based abstractions (we often call them missions, policies, etc.). These are often not any less “theoretical” than academic theory. Reflection also has an ethical dimension. Without critical analysis of the state of affairs, we are unlikely to act rightly. To aid this, the fieldworker’s reflections can draw on the critical work done by others.

Foundations of Asking

Asking people questions rests at the heart of pragmatic fieldwork. In the context of social justice work, it is all too common to assume what the other needs. By simply asking people what they need, the dynamics of philanthropic paternalism can be inverted. SUFK has a tradition of saying, “If StandUp For Kids could do one thing for you today, what would it be?” 

In addition to guiding organizing practices, asking is at the root of data generation. Of course, interviews are a mainstay of qualitative research (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008). Also, Dewey’s (1939) creative democracy relies on using past experience to order conditions to improve future experience. How exactly is one to get at past experience if not by asking about it?

Foundations of Observing

Related to ask, observation is another empirical foundation for pragmatic fieldwork. Observation characterizes ethnographic methods (Spradley, 1980). Fostering attentive ways of being in the world improves immediacy, empathy, evaluation, and a host of other organizational virtues. 

I feel the etymology of “observe” is instructive. It means “watch,” but the word comes from the Latin root ser, which means to protect or guard. While surveillance often is rendered in a negative light in critical scholarship, to watch over people who are in actual need of protection is a highly ethical act. This act could just as well be called “witness,” for simply seeing what others try to ignore is an act of justice.

Foundations of Serving

One of the basic ways that pragmatic fieldwork differs from other academic methods is that it refuses to let the life the people it strives to help be separate from the process of research. Service is related to labor in that it embodies action for the sake of justice, but service is inherently relational. The fieldworker serves people. This is based, in part, on an ontology of immediacy, that the world cannot wait for perfect understandings prior to action. Service is similar to labor, in that it tests the pragmatic value of a belief. Does the belief move you to serve? 

Service also directly improves the mission of academic research. Service stretches across the relational lines of human power, which means that interpretation changes as the fieldworker grows. When I make my body, my mind, my life about others, it alters how I think about them. To care for someone, to make their needs the purpose of my life, has transformative potential. Now, service doesn’t necessarily have an ennobling effect. Serving someone in need without critical reflection, without asking what they need, or without joining in their life has the possibility of reinforcing problematic interpretations of power. However, paired with the insights drawn from critical scholarship (which enters pragmatic fieldwork through “reflect”), service to others can destabilize cultural discourses and can reframe operant schema.