on session 5 (Participatory research on sensitive issues or with vulnerable communities and/or groups)

Today's session was in Aula B, an ampler and cooler environment. More comfortable chairs and three screens for the PowerPoint presentations. Hurra! This set the stage for a picturesque, although somewhat extended, other-knowledges wise talk on trying [the impossibility] to make in-the-middle-of-the-field methodologies horizontal... through drawings.

Athi waves his hand making a point I didn't register in my diary. Carolina doesn't seem to be taking notes here either. I apologize for my inability to straighten the picture. These are very dark photographs. Next time I'll try photoshoping them.

Everyone seemed focused on what he was saying but I cannot longer tell what it was. 

I will center, however, on the second part of the session. Did we really trivialise women-who-have-sex-with-women (WSW) rape victims? Performance therapy (for lack of memory of "the better" name of the intervention) conducted with a group of women prostitutes in Bogota gave positive feedback regarding the possibility to distance themselves from their experience by enacting them/role playing. As Shakespeare or Borges or 1001 Arabian Nights (to recall "the classics") they played a play inside a play. "Family constellations" is another technique from the psycho-suffix experimental adventures into performance as the way to bring the hidden/unnamed visible.

Besides, we, as victims of different types of abuse eventually trivialise our misfortunes. So sings Tori Amos, when she voices herself as rape-victim, motives unclear (but most probably the "slinky red dress" in a patriarchal Midwestern US), "but I haven't seen Barbados, so I must get out of this". Whatever it is you associate the event on a narrative account does not demean the accountant. This is to say, the tragedy remains as such despite the fact that you have to "live with it", even through trivialising exteriorizations. I recently saw a lecture given by Judith Butler (in 2011) discussing what my/hers/our ethical response to suffering at a distance should be or imply. As a very mediocre attendant at a distance (in space, in time, and reason) of that leccture, I believe myself mediated by the scatter thoughts her ideas provoked.

What happens when we, development-concerned people, declare in outrage and from our spatial constraints, be it Den Haag or a non-expat entourage, that something abominable is happening to a set of bodies (e.g. one or many WSW) completely estranged, if only because it is placed in the most remote location of the globe where we have never had accessed or never intend to have access (if only google-wise)? Where does that solidarity arise from? The existence of images that moves us into action might be enough for us to feel their problem ours.

Role playing brings forward problems of representation, the tensions of multiplicity behind apparent identities. The (staged) representative family was not representative at all and came to being through collective imagination. Such creativity should be helpful for a policymaker, be it governmental or not, to imagine policy making, even if the imagined stakeholders are unable to take part (willingly or not) in the Chapatti (or whatever the PAR-tool might be).

There is also the problem of consent. Did we tacitly agree to deal with the "sensitive issue" or was it imposed to us and its structural paranoia? Athi's absence during the participative second half might have been his decision not to deal with the imposition from the outside. Should he be morally obliged to be involved? Or is he, as an empowered subject, making a rightful use of his agency to deny his being there, to refuse response to a suffering he did not cause and/or had no (external) intention of confronting?

I appear very concentrated on appearing concentrated.

My (brief) enactment of a rape-victim did not cover the issues I felt needed to be said, because I was also concerned that the exercise had taken too much time already. As Marcela commented, "I always insist on leaving the classroom by 5 no matter what, but end up with the office clerk attitude: I end up staying there irregardless". I might have extended my story, but then, how valuable (if at all) might it have been to keep everyone from engaging in alternative activities, more productive or of leisure? What was the opportunity cost? Is my concern derived from the (economics) marginalist revolution or is it much more classical (e.g. Bastiat)?

The metaphors of inclusion/exclusion relate to the seen/unseen, light/dark, free-enlightened/bonded-ignorant dichotomies that perpetuate the Westernized cleresy's thought. Despite the flatbread two-dimensional reference to India I cannot tell if our groups and plenary were creating knowledge or simply reproducing Knowledge-as-usual. I imagined Colombian rape-victims, not of WSW in particular, much less in South Africa or Indonesia. I completely missed the contextualizing video screened by the facilitator-group during the break. These ethical dilemmas of representation and its constraints permeate pretty much all participation but somehow expound when addressing vulnerable communities.

An excercise in role-playing. As WSW that had experienced rape we had a hard time using the subordinated green circles. EVERYTHING was of utter importance.

The Chapati diagrams grouped on the floor (upsidedown in this picture), as we re-enacted and/or improvised our postures.