UnMasking Power Relations: From Interview Research to Dialogue for Social Change

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UnMasking Power RelationsFrom Interview
Research to Dialogue for Social Change

• Blake Poland
• Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of
  Toronto
• Francisco Cavalcante Jr.
• Faculty of Education, Federal University of
  Ceará, Fortaleza, Brazil
• CQ Seminar Series, March 26, 2010
• Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research,
  University of Toronto

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conversations with a purpose- the intention
space of dialogue -

• from research tool
• to mutual transformative (co)learning
• community empowerment, social change

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Outline

• empowerment social equity require understanding
  power relations (the causes of the causes)
• the material cultural bases of inequity
• authentic dialogue as empowerment work
• putting culture work _at_ centre of health
  promotion
• dialogical communities as consciousness evolving

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Health Promotion key tenets

• working at multiple (interconnected) levels
  individual, organizational, community, structural
• person-environment relationship
• empowerment
• starting where the people are
• recognizing strengthening capacity
• attentiveness to power relations

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Health Promotion key challenges

• behaviour change lt-gt societal change
• structural analysis psychology of personal
  transformation / collective action
• dialectical relationship between agency
  structure
• deepening the social analysis

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Deepening the Social Analysis

• examining legitimizing personal experience
• seeing connections with others (inter-subjective)
• locating collective experience in broader context
• examining relations of power (how some interests
  routinely prevail over others)
• Examples
• feminist theory practice
• anti-racist anti-oppression, post-colonial
  frameworks
• political economy of health
• Freirian critical pedagogy

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Inequities in Health Some Start(l)ing
Assumptions

• structures practices that generate sustain
  inequities in health are relatively robust
  resistant to change
• power exercised through
• control of material resources
• control of human resources
• control of ideas (hegemony, culture) (Grabb,
  1997)
• inequities are naturalized through dominant
  cultural discourses of relative merit (ability,
  effort, taste), human nature, inevitability,
  etc
• widespread propagation and acceptance of these
  ideas contribute to keeping people in their
  place

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• seeking a deeper social analysis
• about the cultural and material
• bases of power and inequity

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Why Culture?

• we cannot interpret social behaviour
• without acknowledging that
• it follows codes it does not invent
• (Alexander, 1990, p.26)
• changing (lay or professional) practice means
  changing (organizational societal) culture
  (McCormack et al, 1999)

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Culture is one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language
(Williams, 1981, p.87)

• Notwithstanding extensive analysis debate,
  commentators generally agree that
• Cultures involve shared beliefs/values at a
  variety of scales (family, organization,
  community, region, nation)
• Cultures give meaning to ways of life and act as
  a lens through which we look at the world that
  both affects and represents our behaviour, and
• Cultures produce (and are reproduced through)
  material and symbolic forms (literature, law,
  media, etc)
• (Crang 1998)

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Culture is Contested

• cultural studies / new cultural geography view
  culture as the site of negotiation, conflict,
  innovation, and resistance within the social
  relations of societies dominated by power and
  fractured by divisions of gender, class and
  race (Green 1997, p.125)
• varies across space and time (e.g. culture of
  place - Poland et al, 2005)

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Social analysis -gt social change, via dialogue

• the purposeful use of dialogue as a catalyst for
  individual and social change through a deepening
  of the social analysis about the links between
  personal experience (of marginalization) and the
  cultural and material bases of power and inequity

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Why Dialogue?

• dialogue as human way of being/engaging in the
  world (Bakhtin)
• a key site of cultural reproduction/transformation
  
• the power of small groups (being, belonging,
  becoming affirmation, learning, catalysts for
  change)
• reflexivity arising from dialogue with the Other

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Reflective Practice

• mastery of a changing environment requires
  constant learning through engagement and dialogue
• from techniques to framing reflexivity

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Dialogue key questions

• what is authentic dialogue?
• what principles considerations should inform
  the application of dialogical methods as a tool
  for reflexive practice development?
• how can dialogue be brought more fully into
  health promotion?
• (how) can dialogue support progressive social
  change?
• what are the merits dangers of
  instrumentalizing dialogue?

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What authentic dialogue is NOT

• a process for extracting information
• debate or discussion for the purpose of
  persuading
• a political tool for diffusing tension delaying
  action
• a generic method with controllable results
  (reducible solely to its techniques)

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Dialogical Traditions Around the World

• Jurgen Habermas ideal speech communities
• Paulo Freires critical pedagogy
• George Louise Spindlers cultural therapy
• Francisco Cavalcante Jr.s (con)text method
  circles of (multiple) literacies
• Michael Lerner circles of compassion
• Mikhail Bakhtin heteroglossia the addressivity
  of speech
• Martin Buber I-Thou (dialogic source of knowing)
  vs. I-It (dialectic) derivations/abstractions
  thereof
• David Bohm the implicate order in a
  participatory universe
• World Café movement (e.g. Concordias University
  of the Streets)
• Carl Rogers person-centred encounter groups
• chaos, panarchy, complexity, dialogue social
  innovation (Gunderson Holling Scharmer Senge
  Westley et al)

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Dialogue key elements

• telling stories that touch others being touched
• genuine curiosity (but caution re voyeuristic
  cannibalism of the Other)
• attentive to power relations how theyre
  handled
• attentive listening, with an open mind heart
• suspending judgment

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Suspending Judgment

• Act of non-violence
• - not silencing
• Necessary to listen
• - open to being touched, changed
• Draws out what is good in the person
• - e-value-ation finding value

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3 Layers of Trans-form-action (LER)

• Intra-subjective
• - leitura - reading the wor(l)d, awakening,
  liberation
• Inter-subjective
• - escrita - writing the wor(l)d, sharing,
  compassion
• Trans-subjective
• - recriacao - acting in the world, change
• (Francisco Cavalcante Jr.)

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Cavalcantes Circles of Literacies key features

• Valuing human differences
• heterogeneous group composition
• Realization of multiple human potentialities
• people are talented, skillful, varied
• people need space and time to reveal themselves
• Liberating growth-enhancing practice
• rescuing the self through reading writing
• rediscover thirst capacity for change
• (Francisco Cavalcante Jr., 1999/2000)

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Beyond techniques

• To some, asking what is dialogue?
  invites/implies academic definition
  specification of techniques
• but, examining the actual practices of dialogue
  we see that the intention, purpose and conditions
  of application are also key
• and that the latter include not only the
  broader context of application (e.g.,
  leadership/organizational receptivity) but also
  what participants bring in terms of expectations
  and quality of presence

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Dialogue some emergent principles of engagement

• To the full extent we are able
• We operate from a fundamental respect in the
  inherent dignity and worth of every human being
  (including ourselves)
• We are animated by a genuine interest in the
  other, and in learning from each other.
• We find value in each other exactly as we are in
  mind, body, emotion and spirit. We find value in
  the diverse perspectives, experiences, and ways
  of knowing, that we bring individually and
  collectively to this dialogue.
• We are motivated by love and anchored in humility
  (there are few right answers, and none of us have
  all of them!)

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Dialogue some emergent principles (2)

• We are open to being moved, even transformed, by
  the process. And yet, we let go of attachments to
  having to have the outcome of dialogue look the
  way we imagine it 'should'. In other words, we
  are motivated by personal and collective desire
  for understanding and transformation, and yet we
  are also mindful that too many (or too rigid)
  expectations can lead to disappointment and to an
  inability to see the unique gifts that every
  situation contains (and that every person
  brings).
• 6. We are responsible for our own learning and
  also for the learning of others by the quality of
  preparedness, attention, humility, acceptance,
  listening, and participation we bring to the
  dialogue. We claim the courage to speak as well
  as the courage to listen fully to each other
  (listen to the ideas, but also to the emotional
  content, to the multiple subtexts, and to attend
  to the full person)

we wish to acknowledge contribution of students
in CHL7001 Dialogical Methods Reflexive
Practice Development Suzannah Bennet,
KateKennedy, Catherine Maule, Uitsile Ndovlu,
Josephine Wong
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Authentic dialogue across difference some
propositions

• Avoids/goes beyond voyeuristic engagement with
  the Other as a kind of intellectual tourism
  (respects natural curiosity while problematizing
  tendency to cannibalistic consumption of the
  exotic)
• The onus for educating the privileged about
  oppression is not borne exclusively by the
  oppressed oppressors take initiative to educate
  themselves
• Is politically motivated (has emancipatory
  purpose beyond celebration of difference/multiplic
  ity of voices)
• Moves beyond group therapy sharing experiences
  examining social location are not ends in
  themselves but starting points for critical
  deconstruction of cultural and material
  structures/mechanisms of oppression, and
  possibilities for progressive social change /
  (re)reading (re)writing the world

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Limit-situations to be mindful of

• Dominant modus operandi of managerialism and
  best practice frameworks favours
  instrumentalization of dialogue as a set of
  techniques to be deployed to manage public
  participation in institutional projects
• The natural tendency of privilege is to be blind
  to itself oppression (as a term a reality) is
  only controversial to the privileged
• Language culture often conspire to obfuscate
  how power privilege operate the privileged
  often take exception to the language of
  oppression prefer to discuss poverty, social
  inclusion, SES, or the self-harming behaviours of
  the poor (crime, smoking, etc) rather than the
  structures practices of oppression perpetuated
  daily by themselves, their peers, and the
  institutions in which they have placed their
  faith (the market, the police, social welfare
  agencies, the educational system)
• Postmodern politics of difference (an almost
  narcissistic preoccupation with voice and the
  inability to claim any authority or libertory
  project) may sometimes undermine those who would
  act to challenge oppressive structures
  practices

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Transformative Dialogic Communities

• Tapping collective wisdom to address complex
  challenges epochal change (OHara Woods,
  2005)
• Under supportive conditions for transformative
  dialogue (sustained contact, skilled
  non-directive facilitation, open-heartedness,
  deep listening, respect, relational empathy,
  warmth, non-judgment, diversity, humility,
  willingness to let go, present-moment focus,
  respectful impertinance), an emergent
  self-organizing transcendent group wisdom is
  discernable
• Dialogue is more than a sharing of inner worlds.
  It builds new meaning as well as revealing the
  wisdom present and emergent in the group.
• Deep, authentic group dialogue is frequently
  transformative in unexpected ways.
• It is a way of feeling, living, experiencing
  and being together in ways that provide a context
  for consciousness advancement (OHara Woods,
  p.129)

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Implications for Qualitative Researchers

• What quality of being do we bring to our work?
• What if we adopted a more radically dialogical
  stance in qualitative research?
• What if, as a field, qualitative research in the
  health sciences attended deeply to reality
  wisdom of the Other?
• What if we approached research as a rich
  opportunity for co-learning and deepening the
  social analysis about structures and practices of
  marginalization emancipation, and as a
  celebration of humanity and of life?
• What if we opened to and listened for the wisdom
  that is coproduced under conditions of
  transformative dialogue, in the relational space
  between participants and reducible to none of
  them?

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Lets Discuss!

• blake.poland_at_utoronto.ca
• fscavalcantejunior_at_gmail.com
• 978-7542
• www.blakepoland.ca