Action Pairs

Action Pairs
In addition to performing these pragmatic fieldwork practices one at a time, they can also be done in what I call action pairs. The pragmatic fieldworker can engage in one action for the benefit of another. Formulated as a question, this relationship reads “How can X improve Y?” How can asking improve my serving? How can observing improve my reflecting? How can reflecting improve my labor? Each practice becomes a heuristic device for the benefit of the others. If the fieldworker needs to write an interview guide, he or she can move through the seven other practices to improve his or her asking. These couplings can also form a chain of efforts. Pragmatic fieldworkers can observe to better ask, ask to better reflect, reflect to better envision, envision to better labor… and so on. There is some temptation to lay out an objective order or step-by-step process. However, that process would be both fictive and useless. These processes move iteratively based on contextual judgment, sudden changes in situations, and external demands. I will provide an example of two action-pair chains that I followed during the course of this larger project. Each action pair represents one practice moving into and augmenting a second practice.
 

Serve/Observe: When I first started volunteering at StandUp for Kids (SUFK), I noticed that many volunteers didn’t stay. We were always training new people. I wouldn’t have known this if I had simply visited the organization, so it was through serving over time that it became observable.

Observe/Reflect: Based on that observation, I began to reflect on why. Certainly there are challenges to working with homeless youth. Volunteers burn out. But it may also have been that our training needed to be improved. The training was mostly informational and lacked any real motivational component.

Reflect/Envision: Based on these reflections, I began envisioning new trainings. Ultimately, I restructured the training so it was loosely based on the extended parallel processing model (EPPM) (Witte, 1992). The EPPM argues that fear elicits action when the person thinks there is something to be done and they are the one to do it. Based on this model, the informational section of the training served as a form of fear appeal (for the sake of the youth), and the following discussion of program and practices served as efficacy building.

Envision/Labor: When I shared my new model with the executive director at the time, she decided to put me in charge of training.

Labor/Present: And so I began leading the monthly trainings for the organization and have continued doing so for two and a half years. 

As is demonstrated in the above training example, the action pairs lead into each other. The product of one practice calls for another practice to follow. Did I know when I started volunteering that I would be leading the trainings? No. Absolutely not. Instead, I was guided by contextual judgment as I moved through the scene. The work of a pragmatic fieldworker is not unlike a plant, twisting one way then another as it reaches for the sun. The plant never gets to the sun, just as the work of creative democracy is never complete. However, guided by the aspirant ideal, the fieldworker can navigate around and incorporate different structures or challenges placed in his or her path. Here I provide another example that helps illustrate:

 

            Reflect/Envision: I wondered why volunteers gave their time. So I envisioned a qualitative research project to help answer this question.

            Envision/Serve: The research project encouraged me to be more consistent with my service to the youth. I started going on outreach regularly, which improved my ability to serve.

Serve/Observe: I began taking fieldnotes of my volunteering experiences. I was observing volunteer behavior, and being a volunteer helped open up observational avenues that were very valuable.

Observe/Reflect: As I observed, the actions and discussions of the volunteers began populating my fieldnotes. I read my fieldnotes and thought about what I saw. I started to articulate what I really wanted to know about their commitments and motivations.

Reflect/Envision: Having reflected on what was really curious, I could better envision how my interviews would go. I created an interview guide based on those reflections.

Envision/Ask: As standard qualitative practice suggests, having an interview guide improved the interviews I did. I recruited various volunteers and interviewed them on their commitments to SUFK.

Ask/Reflect: The answers to their questions became transcript data, and that, along with my fieldnote data, served as text to analyze. I started looking for themes and patterns. During this time, I also engaged in the action pair Serve/Reflect, as my own volunteering pushed my analysis forward.

Reflect/Envision: By reflecting on my textual data and embodied experience, I created a model that helped describe volunteer commitment, drawn from the metaphors volunteers had used.

Envision/Present: I shared my model with my academic community.

Present/Envision: Presenting forced me to clarify what I really meant, and the feedback I received helped me tighten both my argument and the model.

Envision/Labor: I started thinking about the organization’s efforts differently and began structuring our efforts based on the model. To this day, I use the model as a heuristic device for leading volunteers, strategizing development goals, and helping youth imagine their futures. 

These two examples serve as pictures of the dynamic recursion of action pair chains in pragmatic fieldwork. The fieldworker moves dynamically, even messily, through the various practices. The stories above are in fact oversimplifications. In a single week, situations arose that called me to engage various practices. But despite being impossible to model linearly, the eight practices serve as an actionable guide for pragmatic fieldwork, which I hope serves as a specific model of creative democracy in a qualitative context. The eight practices can be used to create plans for future projects. Scholars interested in doing pragmatic fieldwork can use them as a guide to envision action. The practices are perhaps even more valuable as a dynamic, responsive way of being in the world. There were times when I was in the midst of presenting my ideas, typing away at my computer, when someone called me and told me the youth house had been broken into. 

And so I found myself drilling boards across broken doors or covering broken windows. I wasn’t planning on laboring that day, but situations arise. Similarly, there have been times where academic concerns are far from my mind, and I am simply helping a young adult use Google to find a house. But then he would say something profound that triggers a series of realizations. And suddenly I found myself in the midst of an ethnographic interview, asking him questions and getting answers that speak to an important issue in communication studies. Sometimes I was trying to break up a fight, and in the midst of the screaming and perhaps traded blows, I was desperately reflecting on de-escalation techniques that I could implement. In those moments, I’m never thinking, “I’m doing pragmatic fieldwork!” Rather, I draw on what practices I have developed as they are needed.