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.