Introduction
Research in the academic field is [often] associated with controlling and predicting outcomes […] but maybe we need to visualize research as a peregrination – a journey expressing dreams and hopes for the future along with laying open our vulnerabilities and fears in the process. Different journeys have different stories; therefore, we need to acknowledge and engage with the plural, diverse insights and epistemological contributions about the world […]. ( Sharma, 2021, p. 38)
Dreams are legitimate ways of knowing. If we legitimate dreams, we are producing counter-knowledges, and their importance extends far beyond our current conversations. Dreams are potent forces of change. Dreams are spiritual revolutions. Dreams open up hopes for new futures. But we cannot dream in vain […] We dream what we yearn for. We also dream what can be made possible. We dream what we think about in our waking thoughts. We dream resistance and the possibilities of new futures. ( Dei & Adhami, 2022, p. 803)
As a researcher, I am a late bloomer. Twenty years in a US-based, predominantly white academic space, I am only now reaching the foot of the mountain where I begin to examine my relationship to voice, agency and power. Concurrently, I envision and strive to embody alternatives to erasure, control and domination in epistemic spaces. Over the past 20 years, I both colluded with and resisted epistemic dominance as I reached for a sustainable voice, agency, and epistemic humility. This is a story of continuous reaching and the quest for integrity, authenticity and intentionality. I name integrity, authenticity, and intentionality in an aspirational way. This combination is the North Star of “knowledging” (knowledge-making) with humility: being one among others, not one above others. As US-based academics, we are encouraged to compete, control, and dominate as we produce knowledge, ideally in service of the colonial aspirations of our leaders. Authenticity is a deep re-humanisation, the knowing of one’s voice as one among others, what value this voice speaks to existence, and from what positionality. Integrity in knowledging would probably require that I, as a US-based academic, stand within the value my voice speaks and bear responsibility. Integrity would probably require stamina to deal with resistance. Integrity would also probably require a continued critical reflection on the value I communicate when it receives feedback. Finally, intentionality in order to be humanising, ought to remain in the realm of reaching for connections with humans who seek to dialogue and maybe even connect beyond the human realm.
Positionality matters, for example, “Russian and white”, is perhaps the most productive and the most challenging of my identity combinations. It is both hegemonic and marginal. Being Russian did not become controversial in the winter of 2022 when Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine. I was challenged about the significance of this identity throughout my upbringing. That struggle continued as I developed agency, voice, grappled with dreaming and relating in a communist state, then in a transitional pseudo-democracy and now, as an immigrant, in a racial plutocracy. My lived experiences as a female student in the USSR and Russian Federation, then subsequently as a white-identified graduate student and scholar in the United States, inform the trajectory of this reflection on my story about becoming a scholar in a US-based institution of higher education. This auto-ethnographic narrative follows the path of (re-)discovering my voice, agency, and connectedness as a white Russian researcher, while ultimately reaching for epistemic humility. I begin by tracing the evolution of my voice as a researcher. The rest is “a journey […] and I want […] to go […]” (Giovanni, 2003).
Looking for a Legitimate Voice: Who Is “We”?
I come from the Land of the Firebird (“zhar-ptitsa”). Among a variety of possible interpretations, a firebird’s symbolism is firmly tied to wisdom and a challenge toward growth. Its feathers light up brightly and continue to glow even if the feather is no longer attached to the bird itself. Anyone who captures the bird will be challenged to evolve, often by making choices that require integrity. As a scholar with multiple intersecting identities, a wealth of lived experience and significant epistemic privilege, I have continuously been challenged to take responsibility for my integrity as a seeker, (co-)creator and a sharer of knowledge. I, too, hold the feather of a firebird. It burns me.
Russian folk tales taught me first. I learned about sources of power, about love and violence, altruism and greed, gender roles, and human hierarchies. I learned that the animal kingdom has its own wisdom, and this is something humans should honour. Folk tales also allowed me to escape into an invented world, where I could be anything […] in that imagined world. Folk tales trained me in magical thinking and allowed for dissociation from reality. No need to blame the tales themselves: without everyday outlets to practice agency, magical thinking felt important for survival. In Soviet Russia, most of our choices were pre-selected: from political leaders to college curricula, to available clothes to apartment furnishings. Soviet minds were trained to be conformist and compliant […] and magical. At the same time, life was comparatively easy. Agency was outsourced. Freedom was no longer a burden, since someone else carried the weight of making our choices (Ivan Karamazov spoke eloquently about freedom as burden (Dostoyevsky, 1990)).
Resistance was still possible in the kitchens. Emotional and verbal resistance without meaningful public application that is. I learned to bond, dream and resist in a kitchen. Many Soviet kitchens were spaces of communing, commiserating and freedom dreaming ( Kelley, 2002; Love, 2020). What neither folk tales nor kitchen dialogues could teach me was how to act, organise, refuse oppression and build in real time, in order to make my personal and our communal visions real. In my recollection, freedom was dreamable but not possible, save in the space of a fairy-tale or a kitchen. These were my earliest remembered experiences of involuntary distancing from political agency. Incidentally, this also meant distancing from people with whom I could exercise this agency to organise. We used each other to commiserate, to joke, to celebrate and to hold. We used each other for practical support in dire times. But we could not lean into each other to effect deep change. So, I felt a lot and I also felt alone.
In grade school in the 1980s and 1990s, I found another space for dreaming, a sheet of paper. I started to develop my written voice. I had some writing skills but learned that only a few people were allowed to write for the public. Anointed by the Communist Party, they were the ones whose ways of knowing and expression were approved to be relatable. Their dreams were safe for the regime. So, like so many other students at the time, I learned to write by splicing original sources together in some form of a well-organised collage. My own insights were an untouched background serving to showcase other people’s ideas, making my own insights inconsequential. My freedom dreaming was tightly limited by what approved scholars had already said. The skills I did acquire were those of seeing connections between seemingly unrelated chunks of information. I learned how to notice connections, cut, re-arrange and paste. Yet, the possibilities for a new vision were limited. The frame was just too tight.
Today, as a professor, I find myself sympathetic to my international students. Some of whom also know how to notice connections, cut, re-arrange and paste (sometimes we may list the sources at the end). They call it “plagiarism” in the US: we must properly credit the voices of experts. For some of us, “plagiarism” is a desperate search for a voice in a hegemonic space. We diligently collect expert voices, and in the process any possibility of developing our own voice drowns, after all you are not the expert. Some scholars call it “dependent thinking” ( Hammond, 2015). From dependence, we seek independence. When one wants to break free, there is not much room for nuance: you go from one extreme to the other all the way. At that moment of rupture, the other end of the spectrum is all that one’s eyes are trained on. If we have ever been silenced by dominant scholarly voices, epistemic practices and expectations, we may shut down or we may begin to yearn for the shape of our own independent voices. Unfortunately, instead of noticing and supporting us in our struggle, many of our well-equipped readers might punish our expression-thirsty voices for violation of someone else’s intellectual property. Our bodies and our voices would be excluded, even as all we may want is to be invited into the scholarly community and engage in collective knowledging. US academic institutions can be frivolously exclusionary. I spent a lot of effort learning how to be included.
Inflicted Collectivity
In 1997, I moved to the United States to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees. I wrote my first paper for a psychology class with the help of a friend, who had to midwife my own voice out of me. Our psychology professor who taught one of my first classes at Penn State asked me to explain why I did not choose to write my first paper in my own voice, as an “I”. Instead, I wrote “we believe” and “we discovered”. Confused, I came to my friend to help pull me out of my voice wormhole. Years later, I discovered language to talk about this experience of extracting my own voice from the forced fusion of voices. During that period, as I was striving for independence I chanced upon individualism; they have an uneasy relationship. Ayn Rand, wounded by the shift in power during the Bolshevik Revolution in her/our former Russia, became a staunch supporter of individualism and a capitalist state in the USA. She provided the language for my own journey into independence and, what felt like an inevitable collateral, into hysterical individualism.
It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven. ( Rand, 1996, p. 2)
The opening of Rand’s Anthem shook me. Who is this “we” who authored these words? I, too, was asked this question before. It was not easy for me, as an emergent scholar, to claim the first person singular. I only knew the fear surrounding an individualistic claim to authorship. I did not know, nor did I have the courage to know the shape of my voice. If I wrote publicly, “we believe” or “we discovered”, I faced a whole phantom group of anonymous bodies enacting public scrutiny and consequences on me. That was better. Besides fear, there was another layer in this choice of a written voice. “We believe” immediately granted my ideas some currency. “We believe” magically surrounded me with anonymous scholars who also allegedly “believed” what I wrote. Their company would give my words more weight. Packaged in this way, my insights came pre-validated.
Thus, in my early years as an emergent scholar, I would prefer to wrap myself in this protective cloak of phantom scholars who stood by as my insights faced public scrutiny. It was proper behaviour for a good Soviet. “We” was a symbol of my vulnerability as a scholar. While “we” showed up publicly as a scholar, always and forever in relation; “we” were caught in the net of imaginary voices. Yet our relationship was not one of accountability, but rather one of protection and perhaps even surveillance (at the time this invisible monitoring felt protective).
In her Anthem, Ayn Rand’s project is to shake off the “we” and find an “I”. Her hero lives under constant surveillance. For a while, I too loved this project of shaking off the internal Soviet surveillance of my ideas. I was burnt out from inflicted collectivity: Think this! Choose that! Feel this! Say that! I developed a generalised disdain for authority and, by extension, collectivity of any kind. With this disdain I also shunned the influence of other voices. Like Rand’s hero, I wanted this giddy experience:
I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. ( Rand, 1996, p. 36)
For a young Soviet woman thirsty for a sense of self, the project of finding that independent (aka individual) voice was not only fresh but an essential step toward epistemic humility. Tired from the imposition of wisdom from the anointed elders, tired from the burden of consideration for another, I tried to shake off the relational self. And couldn’t … Instead, I found Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin ended my journey into myopic individualism.
In his introduction to Bakhtin’s (1984) Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Wayne Booth called in my relation-shedding project for further scrutiny:
in our individual lives we are tempted to close out voices prematurely, in order to keep things simple and to dominate the world. (p. xxi)
Upon reflection, it became clear that the relational self I resisted was not in a relation at all. In that relation I did not exist. Mine was, in fact, the closed-out voice. Yet the trajectory of reclaiming my voice took me first into the terrain of domination. As a vulnerable young scholar, I developed a penchant for superiority and domination. I discovered this orientation when I was asked to publish.
Publishing, of course, means writing for the public. Subsequently, it took me seven years from the beginning of my doctoral studies to produce anything for the public eye. To undo self-doubt, I read and imitated the language of Western male scholars, all white. I wrote in their language: linear and sharp, rich in insight, and almost always distant. In my use of convoluted language, I tried to position myself above the reader. I also frequently doubted scholarly voices who were positioned differently than white male ones. For instance, coming across female scholars, mostly white, I had to grapple with my bias: “Can a female voice be trusted with producing a dynamic philosophical insight?” Ironically, as a female scholar, I was trying to produce that very philosophical insight while questioning my accomplished sisters’ abilities to do the same. I relied heavily on renowned white male voices to shape and then validate my voice.
In my early papers, my goal was to elevate myself by demonstrating to the reader their inferiority. If my written expression was intricate, it was because I was a scholar. My job, as a scholar, was to help readers penetrate my otherwise impenetrably dense prose, where the simple expression of a thought would have been enough. In this project, I forgot how to be humble and how to relate to the reader. In fact, I did not care to relate to the reader. I only wanted the self-aggrandising distancing. I lost a sense of gratitude for any ancestral voices that I channelled through me and into my writing.
Today I realise that the readers were real beings of real brilliance with real lived experience whom I wanted to erase from my consciousness. Paulo Freire would have called this oppressive project “necrophiliac” (2000). In this project of erasing influence from the “non-expert”, I wished to erase the desperation I sensed during kitchen dialogues, and the images of trickster-agents I found in folk tales. A new country, new (independent) voice, new academic space for freedom dreaming came at the price of temporary ancestral erasure and non-accountability for my past, current and future agency. In line with US-based academia’s preference for solo authorship (except in fields where individual work is not possible or desirable), I wished to be seen only in conversation with myself. It was my brilliance! I have always had it inside of me! And it was deliriously solipsist. And lonely. I actually reached and “stood on the summit of a mountain” ( Rand, 1996), armed with self-importance, self-protective judgement of others who deviated from the canon and with uninterrogated vulnerability (yet, secretly, I was still in doubt of my scholarly voice and its import).
Groomed by epistemically privileged mostly white male voices (and voices accepted by white males), I scoffed at the plurality of ways of knowing. Backburner was reserved for the work of the scholars who presented their insights in new formats or in new languages. And yet, I secretly liked this diversity. It was refreshing. Though marginal … I could not unhear all the “marginal” voices. These voices helped me to start the journey down the slope of the steep mountain and toward epistemic humility. These voices from the margins started to shape my voice. They broke my certainty and opened up productive doubt, because they wrote and spoke in ways that felt connected … to me, to mine, and to people, experiences and aspirations beyond me and mine. They spoke to each other and to anyone who would listen. They, too, wanted to disrupt oppressive practices and structures. They, however, wanted to do it in collectivity. They made me wonder: What else do I not understand? What other scholars do I not know or recognise as scholars?
In the midst of my independence project, they pushed me to stay connected and to reach for epistemic humility. They demanded that I recognise the absences and that I look for scholars, where they are present, even if those feel like unlikely scholarly spaces. They demanded that I practice moving in and out of the light, sometimes taking the epistemic space that I struggled to inhabit and sometimes making space for new and multiple centres of knowledge. They demanded that I face my shadows, too. When I looked at my shadow, I saw epistemic arrogance, privilege, solipsism, elitism and distancing. I wondered how long I could have survived in the shadows, had the “marginal” voices not provided a way out of the colonial patterns in the academy. They were compelling and generous. I had to get down from the top of that mountain.
The Sideways Glance
On descent, occasionally frightened by my shadows, I needed one important element of epistemic humility, the always-already-there but frequently ignored “sideways glance”. The sideways glance is good for survival, where the terrain is ridden with power traps and power trips. Bakhtin summarised the essence of the sideways glance:
consciousness never gravitates toward itself but it is always found in intense relationship with another consciousness. Every experience, every thought […] is internally dialogic, adorned with polemic, filled with struggle, or is on the contrary open to inspiration from outside itself […] it is accompanied by a continual sideways glance at another person. ( Bakhtin, 1984, p. 32)
I discovered this wisdom more than 20 years ago. It never left. How could I, a single individual, claim any knowledge that is not already infused with other voices? (and whose voices?) My survival as a scholar depended on all the voices. This time our relationship would not be one of protection or surveillance. Perhaps, it could be one of camaraderie. In developing a relationship with these always-already-there voices, “horizontal comradeship” ( Mohanty, 2003) would be in line with my new commitment to epistemic humility. In such a comradeship, I would need to practice stepping back and reflecting on how I take up epistemic space as a researcher, and how or whether access is granted at all ( Puwar, 2020).
From Where Do You Speak?
Meeting the stranger outside of our own boundaries is rather easy, and even satisfies our aspirations, as long as we can return home and appropriate between ourselves what we have in this way discovered. To be forced to limit and change our home, or our way of being at home, is much more difficult, especially without being unfaithful to ourselves. This requires us to elaborate a different subjectivity […] ( Irigaray, 2008, p. 133)
When I enter a research space as a white, rising middle-class, Soviet/Russian immigrant, bilingual, female, mother and US-based bilingual scholar, I am a signifier. I also drag meanings and muscle memories ( Boal, 1993) into the space from all the contexts in which I was shaped as a person and a scholar. Thus, when I enter a research space, I also shape it. I shape it with the voices and muscle memories that come along with me. These voices and muscle memories will engage in open and always also invisible exchanges with the voices and muscle memories of my participants. One particular experience of talking to participants across our vast experiential difference illustrates the way in which our muscle memories talk to each other. This experience shows how and why an invitation into a knowledge-making space should be granted by those with a researcher who engages in knowledging not simply claimed by the researcher themselves. In sharing this example, I also reflect on the attending responsibilities of a researcher invited to step into the space. The act of acknowledging the need for invitation and the attending responsibility relies on embracing epistemic humility.
In 2015, I interviewed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) colleagues to “help them be okay”… in a white supremacist house. Interviewing across racial lines relied heavily on being recognisable, relatable and somewhat trustworthy. What made me one such researcher?
Some BIPOC colleagues I knew personally from our work on committees. They had opportunities to check out how I showed up in my racialised body, what stamina I had for being wrong in my assumptions and who I would become when I was called in for my views and behaviour.
Other BIPOC colleagues met me for the first time as I approached them. I was willing to yield to their guidance and appeared earnest. Perhaps that was enough for that moment … Or perhaps the goal of my research and the possibilities of a better life at a PWI prevailed over their reasonable doubt.
Still, one other Black female colleague gave me a unique insight into why they chose to join the study led by a white Russian woman whom they did not know at all:
If your name was “Mary Jones” I wouldn’t have responded to your email. I wouldn’t even have insulted you by telling you I’m busy. I would just not have thought of it as something that is genuine. So, I think what that says is I’m putting a lot of trust in you, that this is genuine, and this is not another one of those surveys we get from SurveyMonkey to evaluate this person […] So personally, I’m putting a lot of trust in you, trust that comes with your last name. You are actually riding on the capital of your last name.
I wonder if they saw it: both of our bodies carry imprints of moments where denying reality is not possible. My body lived in a regime. My colleague’s body lived in a regime. Regimes leave little wiggle room. One has to respond to reality with a sense of urgency; one has to see reality as clearly as possible, never mind the political window-dressing (in Russia, we had our kitchens where we dabbled in clarity). Each moment in a regime is connected to one’s survival. Maybe this is what Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) meant by the “marrow of life”. I believe when one comes in contact with experiences that represent the marrow, one’s focus is on keeping it together as the moments unfold. There is urgency in one’s being. There is non-fungibility in it. All of these experiences are in my muscle memories. Perhaps my last name was the ultimate flex of those muscles. Yet, if I heard my colleague correctly, they did not admire my “muscle flex” but rather in noticing my “capital”, they asked me to be humble as I proceeded with the study. Epistemic humility here was bound to responsibility for properly handling the insights I would gain by “riding on the capital of my last name”.
Working in the space where I was connected to participants by muscle memories but had a uniquely favourable relationship with dominant power structures, I had the responsibility to continuously engage with the question:
What kinds of actions would require researchers to see participants as more than data providers from whom to extract information for their inquiries? What would a dignified, respectful, and ethical relationship with participants look like within the context of a study? ( Boveda & Bhattacharya, 2019, p. 21)
In the space where our bodies’ muscle memories “speak” to each other, there is a sense of respect. In that unrepeatable moment in a research space, it is hard for me as a soul shaped by collectivist energy to betray someone with whom I am now connected by the invisible, inexpressible, perhaps subconscious ties. My well-being is intertwined with their well-being. As a researcher, I cannot hide behind objectivity and willingly sublimate connections to participants: this would be tantamount to excising the elements of our existence that transcend the verbalisable and the analysable. These elements are the material of our muscle memories and our voices. This material is knowledge. This material shapes our research process. Our process of coming together in a research space is also knowledge. This coming together was ongoing: from trust building to continual transparency with data and how I was processing it, to suggestions for institutional changes, which all came from participants with me only organising them neatly on a page. Perhaps, what I describe here was yet another example of “horizontal comradeship”.
In this space of intimate knowledging, power dynamics are particularly elusive. Even if as a researcher and a participant we can find this magical transcendent space during an interview or another private exchange, the space where power does not matter or is visible and accounted for, we do not actually live in that transcendent space. As a researcher, I was honoured to have been invited into that intimate space of connection by most of my participants. Having visited the space, having somehow altered it with my curiosity, and having been changed by the exchanges within our space, what would be my responsibility to participants and myself when I step out in public? Betrayal becomes possible when, as a researcher, one steps out in public, gifted with insights from their study. The public space tests one’s epistemic humility as well as the related responsibility for handling the granted insights. Will an epistemically privileged researcher lean into extraction and treat these insights as their own property, separated from the ones who gifted them their wisdom? What could prevent the activation of the extractive mode?
In my case, the colleague who called me in to stand by the responsibilities emerging from my last name, was right. In my last name is an element, a culturally significant element, that evokes interdependence and responsibility. The participants in that study entered my community and “shaped” me. In my collectivist mindset, developed in Soviet Russia, I will not be well, if I choose to betray my new community members. They cannot be reduced to data providers. Together we created knowledge through “experience, interconnectedness and participation” ( Shiva, 2020, p. 86). Yet, even with this factor in mind, our intimate relationship could still develop in more than one way when in public. Our inequitable relationship with power could easily undermine the relationship and trust we had established in the intimate space of a one-on-one interview.
Stepping into public light while bearing the gifts of our interconnected knowledge, I, the holder of significant epistemic privilege and race-based power, have at least one critical responsibility and that is to avoid centre-staging my voice. I say this with a caveat: as a holder of epistemic privilege and race-based power I also have a responsibility to put my privilege on the line to make space for new voices ( Love, 2019). In essence, I still have to take up space with one toe on the stage. Having taken up space in this manner, till this day I wonder what choices I should have made as a white-identified researcher at a PWI to ensure that my BIPOC colleagues could speak their truths without my white mediating body …
In retrospect, I see an important distinction between how we, the holders of epistemic privilege, can show up in intimate research spaces and how we show up in public spaces. While I bond with participants in an intimate private space of our one-on-one conversations, it feels organic to embody what Paulo Freire (2000) called the “being with”. The intimacy of the space practically demands this comradeship. When stepping out in predominantly white public spaces to communicate my BIPOC colleagues’ insights, there is a distinct possibility that, in that moment, I can be shaped by the demands of such spaces as much as by my own under-interrogated white muscle memories. In these spaces where my white body is always-already embraced ( Ahmed, 2007) and it is embraced favourably, it can be easy to fall into the trap of “being for” and “speaking for” my BIPOC colleagues, thus abrogating our horizontal comradeship, distancing myself from them and failing at epistemic humility. And this may be what my colleague cautioned me about when they said that they put a lot of trust in me. My responsibility as a researcher is always to remain “with” the people who offer their insights. Being with somebody demands reciprocity. I continuously grapple with what my corresponding offering will be in any given exchange across differences. Currently, I know that this offering relies on doing my own internal work in community with other white people who are grappling in their own ways. I have to interrogate my muscle memories.
While the work that I had done with BIPOC colleagues offered some institutional utility and prompted some minor changes in policy and practice, eight years later the status quo still reigns at the institution. The institutional obstacles to change are formidable. I still work with and organise with my global majority colleagues, while at the same time I had to take a step back. As a white-identified scholar, there came a time when I had to rewind and re-start my journey as a white Russian researcher and face the positionality question: “From where do you speak?” This time I stepped into my own internal and institutional work within my immediate sphere of influence. I hold no illusions about the complexity of the terrain: while my internal work depends on my effort, institutional change is a collective endeavour and, therefore, requires that a) I continue to grapple with my feelings about inflicted community; and that b) I embrace the ebb and flow, the challenge and promise of possibility that is at least partly out of my hands. While institutional change depends on re-imagining the very culture of an institution (and addressing resistance to the systemic forces every step of the way), this re-imagining also requires that we re-imagine ourselves (Department of Dreams quoted in Benjamin, 2024).
Today I am reaching for epistemic humility in a research space where I and my participants are bound by lived experience (and perhaps similar reaching); the space where we re-imagine ourselves. We are bound by some of our existential crises and aspirations and by our common and ongoing ethical challenges. Today I work with white-identified racial justice educators in the United States. We are said to be connected by our “epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” ( Mills, 1997, p. 18). Knowing this, we are also connected by our continual grasping for clarity. This material and the corresponding practice of reaching for clarity, honesty, and existential and emotional stamina inform the formation of new subjectivities. In our daily and professional lives, we are “the un-sutured” ( Yancy, 2017). Being un-sutured (un-constituted) implies for whites
the capacity to tarry with the multiple ways in which their whiteness is a problem, and to remain with the weight of that reality and the pain of that realization. Being un-sutured is a site of openness, loss, and great discomfort. ( Yancy, 2017, p. 13)
For the un-sutured, the very experience of grasping for agency and for the shape of one’s voice demands grappling with epistemic humility. As the un-sutured, we bump against the edges of our own epistemic ignorance and bang our heads against the walls of “a moral shelter” ( Yancy, 2015). It is said that as white people we create this shelter as a form of protection from counter-white embodiments, epistemic fissure, and general disruption of white normality ( Yancy, 2015). In this shelter, we could be whole, pure, ignorant, and closed off. As George Yancy imputes, we can remain “uninfected”. A moral shelter renders epistemic humility unnecessary: in that shelter we are good. While none of us (participants or researchers) are actively looking for this shelter, it is always-already-there and available. Thus, the practice of being un-sutured relies on vigilance against the seductiveness of the moral shelter and stamina to not just be open to being wounded, but to “remaining with the open wound itself […] tarrying with the pain of the opening itself, the incision, as it were” ( Yancy, 2015, p. xvii, original emphasis).
As a researcher who has been trained to come from a place of knowing or at least educated guessing, I wonder: How does one inquire, speak and write from the space of not knowing, not noticing, not quite grasping, not feeling? I constantly find myself striving and reaching for understanding. In this reaching there is an uneasy recognition that some essential knowledge or muscular memory is not held by me; in fact, it will not be held by me, yet it is essential for my integrity as a researcher and a person. I am invited to navigate my relationship to this centre of knowledge. I am not that centre. My relationship with this centre also invites me to embrace the knowledge and muscular memories found in me. I am often not conscious of their existence, although the suspicion that there is something more, something beyond my intellectual grasp, is always there. This reaching out and reaching within invites a new way of knowing. Intellectual exercises are impotent here. I have recently discovered soul-scribing, which is an essential practice in Resmaa Menakem’s work on somatic abolitionism (see resmaa.com). In my experience, I understood soul-scribing as an embodied journaling practice, a kind of somatic deep excavation, that invokes the powers of many intelligences, not just the familiar meaning-making one. Somatic abolitionist work invites me, as a white researcher, into the space beyond one familiar intelligence. As we scribe, we disrupt epistemic dominance and build a sustainable and generative alternative epistemology. Soul-scribing invites the entire soma to inform an epistemology of individual and collective healing: vibe, affect, sensations, imagination are all welcome. A consistent and ongoing practice of soul-scribing in a group creates a foundation for a healed culture. An un-suturing and epistemic humility in such spaces are expected.
In the current study, I am experiencing connected knowledging. My white-identified participants and I often operate on the non-verbal level of vibes, images, sensations and affect ( Menakem, 2017). For this reason, I do my own transcribing of video interviews. Typically, this process is outsourced to our underpaid undergraduate or graduate students. I do my own transcribing because our collective knowledging goes beyond words spoken during the interview process. During this transcription process, I am once again in communion with my participants and their energies. I get to see how they move, how they send energetic and other non-verbal messages about their own work around the topic we are discussing. They are present in their “un-suturing” and reveal some of their muscle memories. Many of them I recognise. Others are novel and are there for me to learn from. And, I believe that I bring a reciprocal offering to our epistemic space. We are connected through non-verbal knowledge, incomplete to be sure, but valuable nevertheless. It is valuable in building a healthier generative communal culture ( Menakem, 2017). This is indeed one purpose of my current research: to collectively reveal our muscle memories and other material, and to collectively dream and put in place new ones, disrupting the “hegemony of white ways of knowing, white ways of being, white ways of emoting, characterizing, silencing, brutalizing, institutionalising, oppressing, naming, interpreting, seeing, not seeing, terrorizing, policing, mythologizing, distancing, blaming, denying, avoiding, and inviting” ( Yancy, 2004, p. 12).
Disrupting epistemic hegemony and reaching for epistemic humility has been the anthem of my journey toward becoming a researcher with a voice, my own and not quite; with a sense of agency that fluctuates between a desire to take up space individually and to stand together with participants and scholars in a horizontal comradeship. Disrupting epistemic hegemony relies on visioning, on dreaming up ways to be present in rather than to escape reality. A US-based academic space affords me the privilege of a dream space. I can choose to dream of idyllic scenes with me at the centre. I can choose to dream of a return to the familiar sutured wholeness.
Yet, I can also choose to dream as an act of resistance ( Kelley, 2002; Love, 2020; Hersey, 2022) against epistemic privilege while always reaching for epistemic humility. And I can choose to remain un-sutured and available in my inquiry and my writing while using a researcher voice that is always-already infused with other voices. I have not always wished for this connectedness. Today, I do not see another way to engage in knowledging. The voices that I listen to and work with come from pluriversal centres of knowledge. My voice remains internally dialogic, intertwined with a multitude of voices. In this epistemic space, “we sense”, “we scribe”, “we resist”, “we vision”, “we experiment”, “we try out”, “we go back and forth”, “we grow stamina and communal glue”, and … We remain. Humbled. Accountable. Here. Today.
And, as a researcher, I continue to reclaim a sustainable and interconnected “we”.