Community Knowing

I find that many research designs hold the academic world at the center. Consider Lewin’s (1951) famous assertion, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (p. 169). While I agree that good theories lead to good action, notice there is not a similar phrase running around, “There is nothing so theoretical as good practice.” Consider translational scholarship, wherein the academic translates his or her ideas so they can be read by nonacademic audiences. While I applaud translational scholarship, and believe that academic writing could stand to be less opaque, the idea that knowledge rests first and foremost in the academy flounders if Rorty’s critiques hold sound. If there are no privileged representations, then one community (say, a discipline in the academy) has as much knowledge to learn from another community as it has knowledge to share.

As such, an important part of doing pragmatic fieldwork is bringing together diverse epistemic communities. An epistemic community is a group of people who engage in inquiry together and provide for each other the social dynamics of justification, and in so doing, coordinate action. Epistemic communities authorize and reject claims based on how the knowledge game is played. Rorty’s (1979) assertion that communities serve as the foundation of the justification process deeply informs pragmatic fieldwork. Instead of privileging the research question, pragmatic fieldwork takes a stakeholder approach. It is more relevant to pragmatic fieldwork what communities of knowing the researcher is going to move between than any particular framing of the question. The following question helps identify who should be included in the project: “Who are the communities that have a stake in this issue?” 

Taking a multi-community approach also helps establish a sense of mutual footing. In many forms of research, data comes from the field, while theory comes from academic writing. From the perspective of Rorty, who refuses to favor certain representations and highlights the communal aspects of knowing, the spoken texts of interviewed people and the written texts of academics are both forms of knowing. As such, it is more meaningful to speak about bringing two epistemic communities into conversation than to suggest that one community authoritatively interprets the other.  

While many research methods seek to know about, pragmatic fieldwork advocates for knowing with. The academic world is one of the communities, while the other communities depend, of course, on the nature of the study. For me, my interest in homeless issues led me to include the discipline of communication, homeless youth, human service volunteers, and nonprofit leadership communities. It is possible that a pragmatic fieldwork project could include only two communities, the academy and one other. However, I encourage fieldworkers to attend to the social dynamics of the particular place they wish to impact. One doesn’t always know how the communities of knowing will parse out until the process begins, and being willing to conceptually separate sub-community structures can prove useful when gaining the language competence, trust, buy in, and other parts necessary for knowing. 

Once the communities have been roughly identified, the pragmatic fieldworker endeavors to join them in appropriate and ethical ways. Bodies are sites of transformation. Experiences, relationships, and human powers serve as a foundation for methodology. As a human instrument, the researcher joins multiple epistemological communities and becomes one medium through which the situated social worlds of the various communities pass. In my case, in addition to living and working as an academic, I served as a direct service volunteer, I served in a (volunteer) leadership capacity, and I had several short and one prolonged period of intentional homelessness. I found that seeking solidarity with each community shaped my commitment to the project, interpretive frameworks, and ability to relate to each community.  

Now, social worlds do not pass through a person with unproblematic equity. Researchers may occupy one social world more than another and some social worlds hold more sway over the researcher’s interpretations than others. Mutuality, even between the notions held by a single mind, is never a place perfectly occupied. I suggest the pragmatic fieldworker apply the same “work in progress” label to their role as medium as she does to her ideas and actions. Interestingly, the community model can actually clarify the process of reflexivity, since identification with different communities can serve as starting points for contemplation (“As a volunteer, I see this..,” “As a communication scholar, I see that…”). Membership in communities provides critical reflexivity with some context by giving the interrogating “I” a place in which to stand. 

It is quite feasible to do high-quality scholarly work without a full membership model. However, there are various advantages to being an active boundary crosser. My varied roles helped me generate interview questions. I could draw on different identities to negotiate access and foster various forms of social capital. Sometimes people from one sphere asked me about life in another. Perhaps most dear to me and still to this day, my past and periodic willingness to live homelessly helps me communicate and commiserate with the homeless people I serve. It forces me to take complaints more seriously, helps me attend to the impacts homelessness can have on mindset and mood, and provides me with ideas for creating new programs. Depending on the issue, not all researchers can simply join all of the constituent groups they wish to engage. However, I would encourage all researchers to seek appropriate and ethical ways to share in the life of all the communities involved.  

Engaging in pragmatic fieldwork can also guard against potentially problematic research practices. Some scholars implicate qualitative research as engaging in colonialist forms of knowledge production (Smith, 1990, Denzin & Lincoln, 2011), whereby the social world of the scrutinized people is stolen, transported to the home culture, and transformed into a menagerie. Even researchers who actively try to help the studied population can fall into the colonialist trap of impinging their normative operating models on the studied population. This leads to “improving” the lives of others by making them more closely resemble that of the researcher. 

Pragmatic fieldwork tries to avoid this pitfall by broadening what counts as field. The process of pragmatic fieldwork seeks to know with people in addition to knowing about things. As such, the fieldworker should seek the mutual benefit of all epistemic communities they belong to. Now, particularly in the context of social justice issues, not all communities have the same levels of need. Therefore, a fieldworker should not pretend all communities they draw together need the same level of labor. Nevertheless, from an epistemic perspective, pragmatic fieldwork follows in Rorty’s (1979) critique of philosophy. Philosophy cannot be the “tribunal of culture,” any more than it can create a mirror to nature. Instead, the pragmatic fieldworker engages in an inter-communal project of mutual discovery and action. Earnestly joining those communities creates the epistemic landscape of the project. This is not to say that values are never imported or imposed on others. Certainly I am driven by particular ideologies that I carry as I join other communities. But fostering a position of vulnerability as a researcher and striving for polyvocality helps ameliorate some of these concerns. Pragmatic fieldwork sees community as the lattice through which inquiry grows since social life is the mechanism that produces knowing.