ResearchingWITH: Narratives and Crafts in Research in Psychology

Abstract

In this paper, we share research narratives based on our practice as researchers. We understand that narrating, researching, and weaving are intertwined processes that lead us into peculiar and unpredictable actions in the research field. Therefore, researching is a risky practice. It entails unforeseen transformations and is both a craft and an ontological policy: If there is no given reality, what realities are performed along with our research practices? For what and to whom do we produce knowledge? We aim to discuss research policies that are in tune with local, contextualized, and embodied knowledge, and ways of doing research that consider the other—or the “object”—not as a passive target from whom you get information, but as an expert. Consequently, researching is understood as sharing expertise and as a reciprocal transformation device that activates all of those involved. We intend to share what has been produced by our research groups in Brazil. Our studies are intertwined as a network of connections and affectations and are guided by ResearchWith, which is a way of undertaking research that weaves WITH others and not ABOUT them. We emphasize this experience as a way of doing science in the feminine and we understand this as a craft.

1. Introduction

In this paper, we share research narratives based on our practice as researchers. We understand that narrating, researching, and weaving are intertwined processes that lead us into peculiar and unpredictable actions in the research field. Therefore, researching is a risky practice. It entails unforeseen transformations and is both a craft and an ontological policy: If there is no given reality, what realities are performed along with our research practices? For what and to whom do we produce knowledge? We aim to discuss research policies that are in tune with local, situated, and incarnated knowledge, and ways of doing research that consider the other—or the “object”—not as a passive target from whom you get information, but as an expert. Consequently, researching is understood as sharing expertise and as a reciprocal transformation device that activates all of those involved (Moraes 2010; Moraes et al. 2014; Quadros 2014). We intend to share what has been produced by our research groups in Brazil. Our studies are intertwined as a network of connections and affectations and are guided by ResearchWith, which is a way of undertaking research that weaves WITH others and not ABOUT them (Moraes 2010; Quadros 2015). When we define this experience as a way of doing science in the feminine, we highlight the fact that we are women, we do research with women, and the research is affected by and addresses a heritage that we can no longer exclude from our practices. We understand this as a craft, which resonates with Stengers (1989) idea of the researcher as someone who is willing to wait, to learn about the interlocutor’s time, delicately treading the research territory while paying close attention to its singularities. Our writing is as patchwork—a metaphor for how we sew our trajectory. Our research is a craft and the art of doingWITH, in which power and knowledge come to be distributed in this field of affectations, subverting both the hierarchical model of knowledge that separates and ranks subject and object, and the respondent, which defines the object as a passive provider of answers to the questions made by the researcher.1 Therefore, the markers provided herein do not follow the traditional model for presenting research results but express how we gradually strengthened the narrative as a methodological choice for our studies. As proposed by Mol (1999), we believe that this is an ontological policy in which we affirm other ways of conducting and presenting our studies as having potential, especially in the field of the social sciences. With this potential, the affectations of our bodies could unfold into interventions. When we consider doing science in the feminine, which is our point here, narrating, feeling, and researching are articulated to bring us closer to the world we live in and to allow us to intervene according to what we go through in life, because science and life are involved in an unceasing dialogue. In order to do that, we must maintain an active presence in our work because according to Despret (2004),

To ‘de-passion’ knowledge does not give us a more objective world, it just gives us a world ‘without us’; and therefore, without ‘them’—lines are traced so fast. And as long as this world appears as a world ‘we don’t care for’, it also becomes an impoverished world, a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures; in other words, a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world.

(Despret 2004, p. 131)

Next, we present what we collected during this research in the feminine trajectory as public university researchers in Brazil.

2. Narrating and Welcoming Narratives: A Methodological and Political Choice

To understand the ethical implications and the challenges of qualitative methodologies, we started with the basic question “Why narrate?” in order to unfold the question and thus set the foundation of our research policy, believing that this is a pertinent and current discussion, especially in the fields of psychology and the social sciences.

2.1. ResearchWITH: Why Narrate?

The term “ResearchWITH” coined by Moraes (2010) and since used by us and by other authors, such as Prestrelo (2015), Arendt (2016), de Oliveira Franco (2016), de Almeida and de Toledo Quadros (2016), and Prestrelo et al. (2016), highlights the active and engaged character of the study, inviting us to reflect upon our practices in the field of science. This perspective includes considering the object of research as active and participating, but not as a passive target of our investigation. This makes the action of researching symmetric by distributing power and knowledge in the process of knowledge construction. Doing research with the other leads us to ask about the meanings of the preposition “with” in the knowledge relationship. It is undoubtedly a sort of bond. Saying that does not tell us much about the type of bond that is at stake. Therefore, as we have been doing research with and not about the other, the knowledge relationship leads us to state that knowing involves a process of mutual transformation. If we interpellate others on our research questions, the others will also interpellate us back. To receive back the other’s gaze (Haraway 2008) is to accept being at risk of encountering difference and to risk that the research project must be redesigned because of the interpellations that the subjects with whom we research make. Following the leads that the researched subjects give us, not as passive beings, respondents, but as active subjects who accept, one way or the other, to engage with us in a knowledge device, is what we call a challenge, not only of method but, above all, of ethics. Why do we invite an ethical discussion here along with the one about method? We are certainly not referring to ethics as the set of precepts and normative guidelines that rule over research. The ethical challenge lies in the immanence of the encounter. Once we are in a relationship, researchers and researched subjects, what world will we compose together? What stories will we continue from the moment of our encounter? The stories we will narrate from our encounter speak about the worlds that we will compose, that we will bring into existence from our research. Therefore, the ethics at stake concern two points: The first is to consider what happens in the encounter between researcher and researched, both in terms of affections and in terms of planning, detours. The second point has to do with the world we will build together from the encounter, that is, the stories we will continue from the research encounter. These questions can only be answered locally and situationally, but still they must be formulated in each research device. These are lingering questions when we choose ResearchWITH as the direction for our work in knowledge relationships.

These conclusions take us back to what Stengers (1989) calls “science in the feminine”, which involves establishing ties, waiting, and allowing for a dialogic process to happen in the field where the researcher works. The aforementioned author was inspired by the trajectory of Bárbara McClintock to distinguish the kind of researcher who is prone to speed and generalization, from the other one who is attentive to singularities and to the sluggishness sometimes imposed by the object. The latter would characterize doing science in the feminine by being more attentive to the bonds and needs of the field of research. Along the same lines, de la Bellacasa (2012) reminds us that “creating knowledge is a relational practice with important consequences in the shaping of possible worlds.” (de la Bellacasa 2012, p. 199).

When we affirm ResearchWITH as a way of researching in the feminine, we base ourselves on assumptions that emphasize that doing science is a craft, just like the practices of McClintock, Marie Curie, and so many other women in science who faced the challenge of doubt, of invalidation, or disqualification of their “lonely” ways of conducting their research.

We return to the question “Why narrate?”, understanding it as a device that strengthens the ResearchWITH, since it is in the intensity of narratives, it is in following routines closely, that lies the action of establishing ties and bonds in the field of research. Narrating entails both retrieving memories and producing realities from them derived, because, as states Certeau (2007), “It happens in an encounter, in the other (p. 162)”, emphasizing the relational character of the narrative process. Research that seeks interaction, co-participation, has in itself the ethical responsibility of the researcher, as well as political responsibility because this researcher creates worlds and produces realities with his/her research. Mol (1999) warns about what he calls ontological policy, referring to the decisions the researcher makes as to what shall remain in their reports and what shall be excluded from the study. This management of what is or is not included in reports has effects, engenders worlds. Choosing ResearchWITH as an ethical basis for research and narrative as methodology was not a romantic choice. We established a political stance in a developing country, a democracy that is not fully consolidated yet, because to narrate is to bring into existence and, above all, to resist in order not to yield to the hegemonic rationality (Santos 2016).

2.2. Sewing Narratives: Craft and Research

It is not by chance that the studies conducted by our groups in two public universities in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil take place in areas of exclusion, such as the fields of disability, street population, and those at risk: refugees and women. Considering what was said in the previous section, ResearchWITH in these fields calls us to review psychology education itself, both in its strengths and its weaknesses. We are, therefore, trespassed by the intersection of many stories that affect us and shape us as researchers in these fields. Our active and living presence in the field keeps us involved and, as highlighted by Haraway and Goodeve (2015), this type of action makes a difference:

And scientific knowledge is about witnessing. That is what the experimental method is about, the fact of being there. And the fact of knowing certain things because one is there changes one’s sense of accountability. So far from being indifferent to the truth, the approach I am trying to work for is rigorously committed to testing and attesting. To engaging in and understanding that this is always an interpretive, engaged, contingent, fallible engagement. It is never a disengaged account.

(Haraway and Goodeve 2015, p. 67)

So, this living process also brings along the unpredictable and construes research as a craft (Quadros 2015). Researchers face the challenging mission of sewing narratives that trespass our senses, our sensoriality, including our researchees, both in what they can teach us and in how they understand our interventions. When we work with women, for example, we are incited to bring to light issues that are also present in our daily lives and, at the same time, we deal with the peculiarities that separate our worlds. We are researchers, university professors, and mothers, crossing a field of research of women at risk with different education levels who are also mothers. What stories bring us closer or set us apart?

If we focus on profile data, differences certainly seem to be a given. But when we collect living narratives, our worlds intertwine in many ways, in concerns we have, and in pressures and longings that talk about certain circumstances of being women in Brazil. We emphasize how important it is not to simplify this point. However, what we want to highlight here is the power that narrative can bring into research, moving us from the center to the margins, inciting us to unmake truths that are apparently given. This also involves the availability of the researcher to be at risk.

So, following processes and composing narratives can be compared to a refined craft that demands perseverance, patience, respect, and humility and can call for a variety of tools (Quadros 2015). According to Benjamin (1987a, 1987b), narrative is craftwork. The narrator is an artist in that he resignifies what he lived when he narrates his experience, retrieves memories, and looks for references in his daily life.

Narrative is, therefore, an open work, which can gain new meanings in the act of narrating itself. For the purpose of research, this is an art that comes into existence in the making, from inventions and local arrangements that try to preserve the material collected but may bring about new possibilities in this DoingWITH.

2.3. Narrating, Weaving, Researching: Ways to Exist and Resist

“I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men.”

(Clarice Lispector—The Hour of the Star)

Clarice Lispector’s quotation depicts writing as a way to resist what is established and the act of resisting outlines existing in itself. This is a story that pervades the many types of resisting–existing of women in various times and cultures. In a different context, writer Anzaldúa (2000) also offers us another compelling account when she writes about why she is compelled to write:

Because the writing saves me from this complacency, I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.

(Anzaldúa 2000, p. 232)

So, bringing stories to the field of research, turning narrative into a driving force is, above all, a way to resist and multiply versions of reality other than the dominant one. And this is an action that stems from this science in the feminine described by Stengers (1989). We are, therefore, researchers and craftswomen who try to find with ResearchWITH a way to value narrative as the manager of data and realities constituted in the relationship of the researcher and object under research.

The methodology of collecting and weaving narratives in research removes us from the search for generalizations and universalizing statements. We are thus interested in Haraway’s idea (Haraway 1995) of knowledge that is localized and that comes into existence in the local networks and arrangements. Considering social psychology research, this way of conducting research brings us realities from our daily lives, from the little things that happen, and unveils many different ways in which life establishes itself. This brings forward a field marked by heterogeneity and encourages the researcher to navigate the diversity of shapes and responses to the many questions that emerge from this process, namely the encounter between researcher and field of research. But it is important to remember that this methodology that removes us from generalizations brings in itself the idea of singularity that is articulated in the method, as we are warned by Law and Mol (1995):

But what happens if materialities are local arrangements? Local and decentered? What can we tell of these if it turns out to be difficult to gather them together? What happens if there isn’t a single field to unravel? What happens if there are no interrelated strategies? The answer, or so we want to suggest, leads us to the logic—the multiple logic—of the patchwork, in which we move from one place to another, looking for local connections, without the expectation of pattern “as a whole”.

(Law and Mol 1995, pp. 287–88)

Therefore, this is not a practice that seeks explanations or closed answers, but one that seeks a crafted construction, a patchwork made by hand using resources that come to us, affect us, and maintain a multiple and heterogenous scenario, just like the reality that surrounds us, without absolute confrontation. This is a challenge for research: to understand the limits of our reach, as well as how careful we need to be when we sew. Narrating, weaving, and researching are interweavings of a manual practice, with its own time, which is slower and articulated by the relationships we establish and not exactly by predefined objectivizations. That is why we are responsible for taking knowledge beyond our borders without relinquishing fundamental partnerships with what trespasses us in the process of research.

3. Discussion: Reflecting about Narrative Policy in Social Psychology Studies

In a scenario in which quantitative studies are scientifically overvalued, and the field of social psychology is not an exception, a research methodology that comes into existence by intertwining sensitivity, science, and art has in itself a political and resistance bias since it affirms a different way of doing research. There is a power in narrative that reverberates through the field of research and reconfigures the notion of object in the act of researching: “Discourse thus produces effects not objects. It is narration not description. It is the art of saying.” (Certeau 2007, p. 154). This is a perspective that makes a world of difference because it allows us to approach living reality mediated by senses and feeling.

Law (2004) points at a need to create new methodological options to learn more about some realities in the world that are unreachable by the usual methods. Social sciences deal with multiple realities and, according to Law, being in this area summons our private emotions, sensitivities, passions, intuitions, fears, and betrayals:

Method? What we’re dealing with here is not, of course, just method. It is not just a set of techniques. It is not just a philosophy of method, a methodology. It is not even implying about the kinds of realities that we want to recognize or the kinds of worlds we might hope to make. It is also, and most fundamentally, about a way of being. It is about what kinds of social science we want to practice.

(Law 2004, p. 10)

This is certainly a risky and provocative practice. When we emphasize art craft in research and ResearchWITH, we subvert the idea of a generalized and rigid practice and value local arrangements and singularities. Our proposal is to bring about reflection that would displace us toward a notion of free science, free from epistemological tethers intertwined with possible wandering, hesitation, undefinition, and meandering along the flow of experience that researching can produce. Dialoguing with the Actor-network theory (ANT) and feminist authors Stengers (1989), Haraway (1995, 2008), and Despret (2004), we emphasize the relationships between non-modern thought and psychology practices, as well as their unfoldings in research, considering the peculiarities of this knowledge production field and the challenges of doing science that is free, nomadic, without dispensing with methodological organization and rigor as a value. This is fundamental.

When we use art craft and ResearchWITH to support ourselves, we are faced with the need to clarify that we do not relinquish methodology, but we agree with Haraway and Goodeve (2015) when she says that, “Words like “methodology” are very scary you know! Rather than “methodology” I’d prefer to say I have definite ways of working that have become more conscious over the years.” (p. 82) We, therefore, develop defined ways of thinking, without confusing them with definite ways of thinking. There is a concern with allowing the field to point at paths, a prerogative of ResearchWITH, recognizing paths as part of the process and considering that this is a trajectory which includes unpredictabilities that lead us to constantly realign our actions: art craft invites us to do so. We understand that we do not work with stable realities. Our field is characterized by modulations and heterogeneity and, according to Law (2004), we need to create possibilities that match the variation and abundance of our fields of research without reducing or, even worse, minimizing them. Narratives allow us to maintain both the freshness of the encounter of researcher and field and the reliability of what our narrator, as active subject of their own experience, went through. It is our job to sew this living material we receive with art and respect. Telling stories is, first and foremost, a political choice to keep the field, the research, and the researcher alive.

4. Materials and Methods: How to? Risks, Audacities, and Carefulness in Research

In this topic, we use some examples of published studies to illustrate what we do. It is important to notice that we do not intend to instruct or explain “how we do it”, because it would be the opposite of what we defend in this writing—a singular, marked, and situated research practice. So here we sew fragments of our experiences and those of our research group to present the power of narrative. We should begin by presenting the encounter with Maria dos Anjos (fictitious name),2 a 26-year-old woman, single mother to two children, who lives in the street. At the beginning of the conversation, she was distrusting and questioned why our team was there, but either out of curiosity or in order to get something in return, she agreed to talk to us. She provoked, touched us, and aroused our solidarity by touching on a theme that is so dear and common to the feminine universe: that it is often constrained by sexual violence and harassment:

As conversation flows, we can find ourselves in a delicate impasse because talking evokes difficult memories. At this point, sensitive welcoming can be found in a subtle gaze, in being present and genuinely interested; an occurrence forged in the encounter. Maria dos Anjos was moved as she told us that she had been forced to have sex against her will. With a long and deep sigh, she answered along with a short period of silence as if she were venting “Oh… you bet I have! So many times… I don’t even want to think about it. Silence, short and full. Reflexive respect transcended judgement there. And how important it was for all to sustain the silence. How can we not be involved by the provocations from that encounter? How can we not think about the necessary boundaries of the discomfort there presented? Aiming to mediate these trespassings, we let her lead the dialogue, in which she would maneuver between what was possible and what was bearable for her. We took the place of listener/researcher or researcher/listener. She conducted. So now powers and tasks were distributed we continued our mission.

(de Almeida and de Toledo Quadros 2016, p. 232)

Narrative reverberates and brings to light what is sometimes diluted in the interstices. This encounter is not only about a woman in the street. It is about a reality of domination and suffering. There is a risk of being captured by the dramatic load. But once we acknowledge our involvement, the responsibility for the effects of the account and for the way it is introduced in the text is distributed in the field of research. After all, as Latour (2007) warns us, the text is also our laboratory and, therefore, an actant in the study.

In another field work, in a study conducted with people with blindness and low vision,3 the proposal of a body experience workshop activated memories that led us to the unexpected. Objects were distributed to the participants that became triggers for stories. In addition to the sense of smell, they could also touch the objects (rosemary, apple, tangerine, fabric softener, cookies, among others). What happened next is described below:

During the workshop we realized that what was experienced brought words, memories, and sensations to the surface. The time for speaking in the workshop often varies. At the moment when sensations touch speech, all in the group are given the opportunity to speak, establishing connections between experiences, from which we see narratives sprout. And from the scent of fabric softener came stories about the military dictatorship in Brazil. Narratives that are difficult to tell, to listen to, and to collect. It is necessary to go back to the past to hear the appeal that is made in the present, in order to transform the present. We started in a circle and each one brought to the group their stories, from the oldest to the most recent ones, from the dearest to the most common ones, from before blindness and after it. Many stories were told around the circle: shared stories, stories that intersected, stories that more than one person knew. The workshop with the scent of stories had its space reaffirmed also as a space for listening to a body who talks about unspeakable suffering and painful memories. A body that cried out to be heard.

(Moraes et al. 2014, p 62)

We realize here that when we work with narratives, we can expand our borders and activate spaces that surprise us. Bodies have been awakened and entered this circle producing the unexpected. Narrating became a living process, incarnated, embodied by the suffering and tears shed for difficult stories that showed us the dimension of the occurrence overflown from the historical fact and welcomed as painful and singular memory. This is one of the powers of narrative: to bring to the surface the genuine force of what the person lived beyond the fact.

Pervading another field of experiences, we were faced with ageing a thread to sew memories and sensations that become ties binding affections, trust, and solidarity in a multidisciplinary group of care for the elderly. The sensitive account of researcher Luciana de Oliveira Franco4 brings us closer to our limits and possibilities in the face of the losses that ageing brings:

When I was a girl, mother worked as a maid and my grandmother looked after the kids. All she had to do was say “Ahem” and everybody went quiet. Someone told another story and, right after that, Antonia said that those things made her remember about when she was a girl, her mother worked as a maid and her grandmother looked after the kids, meaningfully clearing her throat was enough to make kids behave. I found it so curious that something could evoke the same exact memory, and even more curious how the same exact words were used to talk about it. The group did not find it strange, they listened as if it were the first time, even though they realized it was not. I asked myself if I should intervene and how I would proceed. And next time I intervened by telling Antonia what she had already said expecting her to say something new next: childhood, the mother, the grandmother… and Antonia agreed, and mimicked her grandmother clearing her throat when it was time to stop playing. That was not the way… What other games do you remember, Ms. Antonia? Hide-and-seek, she said. A new question, a new answer. I loved playing hide-and-seek when I was a girl. All my grandmother had to do was clear her throat and we stopped playing and went back inside. I remembered the stories that are told in my family every time we get together. Stories about our childhood that we know by heart, but that are told again, and it feels good to tell and to listen to them. Antonia’s story was told again, this time by me, and I told the coordinator of the elderly care service about how surprised and entangled I was because of the repetitions. She highlighted how important those memories were, they were the pillars to where we go back when the surroundings seem to fall apart. Those repetitions were what made Antonia’s singular history appear, and not the history of any of the many Marias in the world.

(de Oliveira Franco 2016, p. 72)

In this process of including and maintaining our character, Maria Antonia (who would rather be called Antonia because there are so many Marias in the world (de Oliveira Franco 2016, p. 73) bound to the group, the reiteration of the story about her grandmother becomes an important marker of her presence and is therefore understood by her group. So, through the narrative shown above, repetition is no longer just the nuisance of an old lady repeating herself, but starts to conduct and produce other narratives, making everybody express themselves, strengthening bonds, and affecting also the direction of the researcher who starts DoingWITH Antonia, an intervention that invigorates everybody in the group, delicately subverting ageing.

To conclude, we now present another study conducted by Eleonôra Prestrelo along with Erika Araujo, Marcia Moraes, and Leticia Marques,5 members or our group. The study is about care in university education. The study was conducted with groups of psychology students from a public university in Rio de Janeiro who experienced anxiety and suffering in this transition to higher education and introduces a care practice through the action of sharing stories:

Participation in these groups is also an opportunity to reflect upon their experiences, to take responsibility for their actions, to be more engaged in taking care of themselves; broadening possibilities to overcome adversity and look at reality in a different way. As Jasmin said at the end of a workshop: “When I felt ‘square’, I came to GAPsi and it made me identify myself (…)” and more, “Listening to other people’s experiences, their points of view, helped me.” Being close and listening to the stories of people who solved similar issues that are sometimes seen by students as deeply distressing and even as not having a solution, allows the student to look at their impasses from a new perspective. They broaden not only their repertoire of actions, but what is more important is that they can once again believe in their ability to overcome anxiety and to create their own solutions, developing other social networks for support. At the end of the day, being in a group, listening to other people’s stories, offers the possibility of making new ties and bonds. If going to university is often times experienced as breaking previous bonds, GAPsi’s investment is a bet on weaving new connections, on strengthening existing bonds that, one way or the other, produce the sense of belonging, either in the Psychology course or in the University.

(Prestrelo et al. 2016, p. 97)

We saw described above that care as practice took place in this distribution of narratives and were fundamental to supporting these students. Sharing as a trigger for care finds in the narrative an ally that supports the health and permanence of these students who face new challenges. It is important to mention that the public university where the study took place is a pioneer of affirmative action in Brazil, welcoming many low-income students from different communities and cities in the country. Narratives, therefore, weave effective ties that support these students and also support us as researchers from the university who chose a non-linear way of doing research.

5. Conclusions

This is our patchwork, certainly unfinished, but heralds a writing policy that affirms us as women and researchers who develop ResearchWITH as a type of research. In this artisanal way we conduct our research; narrative is a resource that potentializes our ideas and achievements. Going back to the questions that opened this article “if there is no given reality, what realities are performed along with our research practices? For what and to whom do we produce knowledge?”, we reaffirm that we have a responsibility when it comes to what we produce in our research. This awareness can broaden the ways we disseminate knowledge beyond hegemonic and dominant types of knowledge, making room for other versions and decentralizing scientific knowledge. We live in a country of contrasts and inequality, a country of continental dimensions with ethnic and cultural diversity. As Adichie (2012) warns us, there are dangers in a single story that can erase important marks in the construction of science as political practice. Narratives can multiply versions taking us from a single story to many singular stories (Conti 2015), singular here understood in its double meaning. On the one hand, the danger of single stories as in the one-size-fits-all clothes, the standard measurement unit that does not fit anyone well because there is no single measurement that can fit all bodies. On the other hand, the power and strength of single, situated, singular stories.

So, in our practice, we are researchers, as described by Stengers (1989), doing science in the feminine. But, as we showed in this article, we work in a network that also makes us solidary and, in the poetic words of Brazilian composer Milton Nascimento, “the solidary does not long for solitude”.6 May this writing then reach other lands and broaden our network of ResearchWITH, confirming to us that we do not need to remain alone.