On session 7 (Designing participatory research and/or evaluations)

I have been using my mobile phone to take notes, because it appears to be more portable than the notebook. The fact that it incorporates my camera/voice recorder/image editors/note-keeping apps makes all too convenient to leave it aside, not disregarding the fact that I feel the need to take extra care in case something unwanted happens to it. And so let me transcribe some of the notes I took with this odd feeling I was leaving the good old paper notes + pen far behind in pre-smartphone times.


"...ever changing, moving on now, moving fast..."

There is a difference between a random picture and a staged one; multiple ones, in fact. But which? Disparando cámaras was the name of a project in Bogota (the city I have lived in since forever) that 'brought' photo-shooting technologies to people living in poverty (especially targeted for living in problematic housing), from camara obscura to digital zoom in - zoom out framings. Shooting means having a target, a weapon and potential victims... so discursively translating firearms into cameras has enriched the life of some teenagers here. However, power is a different thing. Is the one behind the camera in power? Up to what point? Recently I saw some Ivy League news portraying some Harvard student being praised for his involvement in this project. The people of the community where the project took place were mere context, nothing more. So those behind the technology remain most visible. It is their project (not the communities'). It is a problem of design. That which is being wasted (not necessarily the cameras, but e.g. the camara obscura technology) becomes the means of the underdeveloped. Poor communities can profit from transitioning into development through enlightened means; the saviours keep the press. Reasonablility is important: "it's my school project, it's for my PAR class, it's to make this NGO project accountable..." An external something justifies access to the intervened community, seldom the community itself.  

Marcela and Rosalba, sitting next to each other, seem a like this evening. The awareness of the power of representation highlights links between arts and the humanities and the social sciences. Again performance appears as an important tool for the social scientist, but not an end in itself, as the artful would imagine. This has given way to the mistake of judging one thing in terms of the other or has simply blurred the boundaries that set them appart. However, art (in its Western cannon) has emphasized the individual (even art collectives can be taken for an individual) because it has a hard time keeping track of itself without the figure of the author/authority. This is not only an 'arts' thing. Authors are/have become an important way of acknowledging authority and  those are some of the reasons of why the Harvard article praises the individual over the community of the project he got involved with. So authorship cannot be elude with participatory

the gaze from afar

But that was more of an addendum to session 6. Session 7 drew on the politics of sitting, the goods and bads of placing yourself and others in/on space. Athi the chief, however, continued to be the chief, a voice of authority that draws on the voice of the authorities from his particular SA community. When you place equally for the PAR practitioner more invisible hierarchies are still in place. The circle that welcomed me near the elevator door made my notebook inaccessible, because Liz was sitting diametrally opposed to me with  it, as I had send it (and a chocolate) some minutes before with her. I felt I would disrupt the class if I tried to make a place to sit next to her. However, as I sat inside the circle, still finishing my lunch (eating a plum), Gina offered me tea :) There is a nice network of friendship/power opperating in that particular moment.

Yin mentioned a Chinese game where players identified a keyword of what others were saying. That seemed pretty scary. For those of us who cannot make a concise intervention it might be nice to get a one-word summary, but sometimes your point goes beyond one word.