Nagar- Alison Kopit

Alison Kopit—Richa Nagar, Muddying the Waters

In Muddying the Waters, Richa Nagar asks the question, “Can notions such as solidarity and responsibility, trust and hope, vulnerability and reflexivity serve a useful purpose in ethically navigating the forms of epistemic violence in which metropolitan academics are, and will always remain, complicit?” (3). She posits that there are hierarchies and violence worked into academic endeavors and language, and uses this piece as a way to explore more dynamic modes of giving voice to structural violence within the academy. The suggestions she offers do not simply remove the researcher from the equation on account of their identity, but instead, she expands the concept of reflexivity. Often, reflexivity has been seen as the fix for exploitation in research, but reflexivity does not often (or arguably, ever) solve the ethical issues; rather, it simply makes them more transparent and affirms the researcher’s intention to act responsibly. Nagar’s framework makes reflexivity more dynamic, creating a structure of “speaking-with” and forging “situated solidarities” (85) that shift throughout the research process.

In the speaking-with model, Nagar poses the possibility of considering “more explicitly the economic, political, and institutional processes and structures that provide the context for the fieldwork encounter and shape its effects” (85), instead of focusing on reflexivity as a memoir-like reflection on individual identity. She says that, “The goal must be to build situated solidarities which seek to reconfigure our academic fields in relation to the ‘fields’ that our ‘research subjects’ inhabit” (87). This situatedness implies the researcher’s relationship to sociopolitical and institutional context (100), and requires an integrated analysis that considers the way that power moves dynamically throughout the research process and beyond. In this model, creative, less traditionally “academic” forms of production and collaboration should be valued as important, since many of these forms are more accessible and applicable to the communities of study.

As an artist/scholar, I often find myself navigating the need to produce traditional academic material with the desire to collaborate and organize with the disability community through praxis. While my academic work creates the theoretical grounding for art, it is the art itself that often feels like it can have more of an impact. However, the art that I produce is always viewed as a parenthetical, or extracurricular to the critical theory that I’ve written. In fact, I am aware that my art would likely not even exist if I did not have an advisor-mentor who went through a similar process in her own art-academic training. Nagar writes, “Processual reflexivity and crossing borders with situated solidarities require openness to rethinking dominant standards of academic productivity” (89). Academia hierarchizes, and through doing so, makes things that aren’t immediately legible as prestigious and academic as tangential to the work itself. I have tried to challenge these implicit hierarchies and notions of productivity through submitting my art to symposia instead of my academic work, and by making my art widely available in a way that my academic research will maybe never be (on both a physical and ideological level). I am also aware, however, that this might not be possible as I get further into the program and have to produce more academic work.

In closing, I will share an anecdote about a recent experience with my grandmother that seems to encapsulate the issues I'm navigate. My grandmother was a dancer in her younger years, and always loved that I was a dancer too. I went to visit her over the weekend, probably for the last time, and she asked what I was working on in school. I was so grateful that I could show her a performance art film I had recently made instead of telling her about academics. She does not have any kind of academic background, and although she always enjoyed hearing about school, she was much more disconnected from it than she was to my dance work. After watching the film, I showed her how we could create a dance only moving our hands. Experiencing dementia and other cognitive processing disabilities, it was a relief to her not to have to talk or try to understand. The creative angle gave us so much more possibility for connection. What does this mean, and what implications does it hold for my relationship with the disability community?

Discussion questions:

In an age when art is defunded and not recognized as important by funding streams and educational institutions, how do we place value on these more creative forms of knowing (especially if it puts our funding on the line)?

Nagar calls for reflexivity not to be a one-time definition, but as something that shifts depending on context. In a rapidly changing political climate, how do we continually examine our changing positionality, especially with the slow rate of research (i.e. will our relationships to structures change before the research even comes out?)?