“Nothing About Us Without Us”: Reading Protests against Oppressive Knowledge Production as Guidelines for Solidarity Research

“Ban Outsider Ethnographies:” Reflections on the Politics of Research

During part of the time that I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I was also working on a separate Participatory Action Research project designed in collaboration with organizers at a different homeless social movement organization. Elsewhere, we describe how data analysis and organizing were iterative processes: Homeless peer researchers’ experiences informed our collective analyses, and research findings informed the organization’s advocacy priorities (Herring and Yarbrough 2015; Herring, Yarbrough, and Alatorre 2019; Alatorre et al., forthcoming). Because we analyzed data collaboratively and from a variety of different viewpoints, and due to the combination of academic experience, lived experience, and community organizing expertise of our research team, we were able to maximize the policy impact of our findings.

In this PAR project, I understood clearly the value of my work as an academic researcher. For example, a university colleague and I were able to teach members of the peer research team how to collect and analyze data in ways that would meet academic standards. This, in turn, gave homeless organizers more credibility with local policy makers. In addition to building skills and capacity of homeless researchers, and raising the organization’s profile as an authority on the causes of and solutions to the criminalization of homelessness, our research also revealed and clarified targets for organizing and advocacy.

I wanted my individual ethnography to be similarly useful, to clarify targets for organizing, to raise awareness of the scope and causes of a problem and instigate policy change. Compared to PAR, individual ethnographic research felt, at times, isolating and uncertain. Although my ethnographic data collection and analysis were independent, I wondered how I could infuse my work with the ethos of PAR and adapt some of its practices to fit an individual research project.

As I was asking myself these questions, the nature and uses of academic research were hotly contested both outside of the academy and from within. Controversy over a white researcher’s bestselling ethnography of young Black men’s experiences with policing made headlines in prominent national newspapers and raised bigger questions about the ethics and practice of ethnographic research with—or about—marginalized communities (Jencks 2014; Betts 2014; Sharpe 2014; Lewis-Kraus 2016; Martin 2016). “Ban outsider ethnographies,” a Buzzfeed reporter wrote, in a tweet that went viral (Lewis-Kraus 2016). Many scholars echoed this sentiment (Betts 2014; Sharpe 2014). In response to public controversy, the sociology magazine Contexts published a special issue on ethnography (2016). These debates were not entirely new: Ethnography has been embroiled in internal conflict since the beginning (Liazos 1972; Thomas 1991; Adler and Adler 2008).

Rather than weighing in on debates about the practices of any one ethnographer, I found it more useful to reflect on my own multiple roles as an ethnographer of poverty and marginality, a participatory action researcher, and an anti-poverty activist. These roles overlapped in my daily life, and often seemed to be in tension. As an “outsider” who believes in the power of research as a force for progressive social change, I was interested in this tension.

Direct experience with the harms of misrepresentation means that marginalized communities often view knowledge produced by “outsiders” with suspicion, as researchers who are not part of the directly affected community might be exploiting salacious stories about poor people for their own professional gain, or engaging in paternalism that negates the agency and voice of research participants, privileging the researcher as an outsider-expert who “knows what’s best” for a group of oppressed people.

Scholars and practitioners of Participatory Action Research (PAR) have explored the ways in which research motivated by the priorities and questions of people experiencing poverty and oppression can be a catalyst for social change (Greenwood and Levin 2007). Increasingly, PAR collaborations by marginalized communities like domestic workers (Francisco 2010), people deprived of housing (Plaster 2012; Herring and Yarbrough 2015; Abdullah et al. 2018; Alatorre et al., forthcoming), and sex workers (Alliance for a Safe and Diverse DC 2008; Young Women’s Empowerment Project 2009) show how data collection and policy advocacy can be iterative processes. But, while there are many models of successful PAR studies designed and conducted by professional researchers in collaboration with marginalized communities, the question of how individual academic researchers can conduct ethical, policy-relevant research remains under-explored.

Critiques of the production of social scientific knowledge about poverty have deep roots. Historically, there has been a close relationship between the study and the governmental regulation of poor people and people of color. Scientific research and policy knowledge have contributed heavily to the pathologization of the poor, of people of color and of people whose gender or sexual expression violate dominant social norms (P. H. Collins 2000; O’Connor 2002; Somers and Block 2005; Somers 2008; Willse 2015). Historical analyses of knowledge production are replete with examples, from the scientific discipline of phrenology that was used to justify slavery to the Moynihan report that misattributed black women’s poverty to “a tangle of pathology” and was used to justify punitive welfare retrenchment to the (later disproven) scientific discovery of “Gay Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome” that was used to justify the criminalization of queer communities at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic (For more detailed discussions see Harding 1993; Epstein 1996; O’Connor 2002; Sides 2009). In these and other cases, research has been used to blame racial, gender and sexual minorities for their own poverty and oppression.

This article draws lessons from poor people’s protests against oppressive knowledge production by outsider “experts” to present three problems with research: pathologization, paternalism, and extractive exotification. After briefly describing these protests, I reflect on how anti-poverty, sex worker, and transgender activism shaped my own practices as a researcher, and I offer guiding questions for ethnographers, especially those who are not the direct targets of oppression, who wish to do research in solidarity with directly affected communities. In solidarity research, different from Participatory Action Research, data are collected and analyzed by individual academic researchers in ways that affirm the expertise of marginalized groups and aim to unmask the structural sources of group-differentiated stratification and harm. My analysis also builds on Prasad’s (2018) “problem-solving sociology,” a promising approach that outlines how sociologists can identify causes of and possible solutions to social problems, but leaves questions about who gets to define these problems and solutions unanswered.

Protesting Pathologization

The pathologization of poor people is endemic to social science research and has been perhaps the most powerful ideational force shaping US poverty policy. One famous example is George Kelling’s Broken Windows Theory, which asserts that poverty-related disorder attracts other more serious crime, and that the policing of low-level quality of life and property crime is crucial to neighborhood safety and violence prevention. Although Kelling’s theory is unsubstantiated (Harcourt and Ludwig 2006; Brown and Barganier 2018), Broken Windows remains an extremely influential policy and cornerstone of contemporary policing. Critics have identified Broken Windows policing as a root cause of police violence against poor people of color, including New York Police officers’ recent high-profile killing of Eric Garner, a Black man selling loose cigarettes in public space (Hill 2016).

In 2015, Kelling was the keynote speaker at the US Conference of Mayors in San Francisco. His speech was about how Business Improvement Districts could implement Broken Windows policing. Local homeless activists had identified Broken Windows as a key driver of anti-homeless enforcement, and decided to protest Kelling’s visit because it would increase criminalization of poor people in public space. Poor News Network, a poor people–led organization dedicated to producing narratives that counter dominant ideologies about race and poverty, and the Coalition on Homelessness organized a protest of Kelling’s visit to San Francisco. I attended the protest with Ana, a participant in my ethnography, who had been incarcerated multiple times because of anti-trans profiling and for prostitution- and poverty-related crimes.

The protestors held signs that said, “We are not Broken Windows,” and denounced knowledge produced “about us without us” by highly paid academics who never experienced anything about which they claimed expertise. “I have a PhD in poverty, in being policed on the streets,” one member of the “we-search” team presenting an alternative talk on the sidewalk outside of the hotel where Kelling was speaking said. This assertion served to criticize commonly accepted notions of expertise: real expertise, activists argued, necessitates not academic credentials but real life experience. Speakers emphasized the contrast between Kelling’s brand of outsider research, which pathologized and harmed poor communities of color, and “we-search” conducted by and for poor people. Protestors distributed fliers inviting US Conference of Mayors attendees to a “broken windows expert panel” the following day featuring homeless activists.

At the heart of the we-searchers’ critique is a challenge to dominant ideas about expertise. This parallels similar repudiations from “outsiders within” the academy. Because of a false equivalency between whiteness, maleness, scientific rigor, and objectivity, the writings of sociologists of color and women have historically been excluded from the canon, and even now are taught less frequently than the writings of white men (Ladner 1973; Lengermann and Niebrugge 1998; Morris 2017a; Romero 2017; Bonilla-Silva 2017). Criticism of the erasure of marginalized perspectives from social science has gained currency, along with a movement to decolonize social scientific knowledge production (L. T. Smith 1999; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008; Nagar 2014; Go 2017). Rejecting the myth of “objectivity,” feminist researchers are encouraged to recognize their positionality; to reflect on how their own race, class, ability, sexuality, and gender affect the questions they ask as well as the way research participants perceive them, how they perceive research participants, and the conclusions at which they arrive.

Too often, a sort of empty “navel-gazing,” a listing of identities as “badges” of authenticity or “apologies” for outsider-ness, passes for reflexivity (Patai 1991:149, cited in Nagar 2014, 84). True reflexivity, the kind that improves the validity of research findings, engages with relationships of power. It is for this reason that the critiques by the “we-search” protestors are so important: they interrogate the relationship between experience and credibility, identity and institutional access, as power, and question who has access to that power (Gray-Garcia, Garcia, and Poor Magazine 2019).

As Prasad notes, research that aims to address pressing social issues “does not benefit from giving an analyst’s prior convictions free rein” (2018:394). At the same time, for those of us who do research in order to understand and challenge social problems, it is crucial to address the questions of who gets to define problems and solutions, and how these definitions are influenced by what Becker (1976) calls a “hierarchy of credibility” in social science research. By recognizing the social construction of credibility, research (including we-search and academic research) can be evaluated on the merit of its methodologies and findings. As Becker says, “Whatever side we are on, we must use our techniques impartially enough that a belief to which we are especially sympathetic could be proved untrue. We must always inspect our work carefully enough to know whether our techniques and theories are open enough to allow that possibility” (1976:246).

Feminist researchers have displaced positivist notions of “objectivity,” arguing that a more useful approach is for researchers to consider their standpoint, and to take into account how embodied identities shape ways of perceiving and knowing the world, an assertion that does not threaten but strengthens validity of findings (Nagar 2014; P. H. Collins 2016). The idea that research about poverty conducted by privileged and highly credentialed outsiders is “objective” and therefore superior to research conducted by insiders has resulted not in neutral findings but in research and policy that blames poor communities of color for their plight (O’Connor 2002). Contemporary scholars must attend to the ways in which researchers’ past experiences shape their assumptions and ideas of questions worth asking. Like other feminist researchers, PAR scholars, and “problem-solving sociologists,” I argue that the intention to contribute to social change does not preclude openness to a multiplicity of viewpoints or threaten the validity of findings.

Resisting Pathologization and Respectability Politics at the Same Time

At the protest against Kelling as well as the panel discussion, speakers highlighted how, as gentrification happens, poor people are criminalized in public space, regardless of whether they are doing illegal work or just sitting around. “We’re all part of one movement,” a homeless sex worker in the audience said at the end of the homeless expert panel. Events like these affirmed a mutual commitment to a type of knowledge production and analysis that has as its goal the transformation of oppressive social structures. At the same time, tension remained about what activists call “respectability politics,” the political decision to present the most socially acceptable examples in order to achieve incremental gains for an oppressed group.

Over the course of my research, I observed respectability politics at work in campaigns against the criminalization of homelessness, as advocates downplayed drug use and illegal work in public space in order to focus exclusively on the policing of life-sustaining activities like sitting or sleeping, and privileged the narratives of homeless people who were portrayed as innocent victims of bad luck over those who engaged in stigmatized activities like drug use or sex work. I observed homeless advocates who, in an attempt to publicly contest stereotypes, pointed out that most homeless people are not addicted to drugs, and sex worker advocates who pointed out that many sex workers are university graduates who choose to sell sex instead of or in addition to other employment. But, especially in working with organizations led by sex workers and formerly incarcerated transgender women of color, I also observed advocates who rejected respectability politics, centering the needs of their most marginalized constituents in their public advocacy.

Like advocates, ethnographers who work with marginalized communities are caught between pathologization and respectability politics. On the one hand, many ethnographers are painfully aware of the pervasive pathologization of sex workers or people experiencing homelessness, and we feel a pressure to present sanitized versions of our research participants and their lives, to make them intelligible and sympathetic to the more privileged academic and popular audiences who look down on them. Wacquant (2002) has criticized the impulse to sanitize often violent and chaotic lives as “neo-romantic,” while Gowan (2009) has questioned the utility of detailed portrayals of violence, addiction, and other social ills. Willse (2015) has criticized portrayals of homeless people in canonical social science literature as “heteronormal,” arguing that in endeavoring to make research subjects relatable to a potentially hostile audience, ethnographers may inadvertently reinforce oppressive social norms related to decency and morality (73).

Ethnographers of poverty and criminalized work are bombarded with stereotypes about research participants, and it is tempting to draw on tropes of respectability in response. Reacting to pervasive stereotypes about the groups whose experiences we study and whose well-being we care about, ethnographers might (consciously or unconsciously) choose primarily to present examples of emotionally stable, happy sex workers who view sex work as an ideal career, or examples of homeless people who avoid illegal activities and will thus seem respectable to readers with conventional moral sensibilities. But the problem of a politics of respectability is that it leaves the most marginalized behind. If we rely only on the (true but incomplete) stories of research participants whose lives are most relatable to our imagined (hostile) audience, we erase those on the margins of these carefully drawn borders of respectability. Instead, we must challenge harmful social ideas about decency and deservingness, and insist that drug users, people who do criminalized work, people labeled as mentally ill, and other marginalized populations deserve safety, housing, health care, and happiness, regardless of whether or not they are doing something illegal, or whether their lives fit conventional standards of morality. Only by abandoning the preoccupation with respectability can researchers avoid reinscribing pathology. Rather than fixating on poor people’s behavior, researchers must focus on historical, political, and economic causes of poverty.

Protesting Paternalism

Academic researchers are socialized to believe in their own expertise and to think their training means that they know best. This socialization is often compounded by a lifetime of being white, male, or cisgender, subject positions that are often considered the default standpoint of objective and rigorous academic research. Because they are so confident in their own expertise and in the analysis of others like them, many scholars of poverty and marginality ignore available research and analyses by members of the communities being studied. This section reviews two different protests by sex worker activists against exclusionary and paternalistic scholarship and policy advocacy.

On October 29, 2012, sex worker activists stand on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall to protest against Proposition 35, the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation act. ¹ This ballot measure, backed by billionaire Chris Kelly, was the brainchild of Daphne Phung, who became an activist after watching a documentary about sex trafficking and deciding that she had to do something. Phung founded an organization to end sex trafficking, and sought funding to push for a state ballot measure that would broaden the legal definition of human trafficking and pump money into anti-trafficking enforcement.

Colorful signs read: “Criminalization increases violence,” “Women of color against Prop 35,” and “Women fastest growing prison population.” While sex worker activist organizations agreed that human trafficking (including sexual exploitation and slavery) is poorly addressed by existing laws and enforcement, they argued that Proposition 35 was based on misinformation about the scope and nature of the problem, and questioned Phung’s qualifications as well as Kelly’s motivations in sponsoring this legislation.

A prominent sex worker activist kicks off the protest:

“We’ve invited proponent of Prop 35, Facebook billionaire Chris Kelly, who’s put millions into this proposition, to debate with us and answer questions. He didn’t respond but his presence is here anyway. He’s right there,” She points at a suit, stuffed with pillows with a photo of Kelly’s head taped to the top, “so he’s going to be listening to what we have to say.”

The activists’ use of an effigy of Chris Kelly dramatizes his refusal to meet face to face, to actually listen to their concerns about this proposal, and their exclusion from the policy-making process.

Sex worker activists make three central arguments about the misinformation disseminated as part of the campaign: First, that the campaign relied on sensationalism and flawed statistics about the scope and nature of human trafficking. Second, that largely because of their position as outsiders who had no direct experience in the sex trade, the authors were unqualified to propose legislation. Finally, sex worker activists argue that their own direct experience–based knowledge equipped them to identify and predict the unintended and harmful effects of the proposition.

Paternalistic research and policy advocacy often rely on excessively detailed or sensational representations of interpersonal violence to call for tougher laws and criminal sanctions that can increase poor people’s vulnerability to violence and harm. In her criticism of Proposition 35, one activist argues:

“[Proponents of this legislation are] using wildly exaggerated figures. This act completely misleads the public by mixing up prostitution, which is consenting sex, with trafficking, which is force, coercion and fraud. Some people have accused Chris Kelly (pointing at the stuffed suit) of having political motives behind his financial backing of this measure. And we’re asking, is this another piece of misinformed opportunism, using the public’s concern over trafficking to promote his political career at the expense of sex workers and others?”

On a different day, in the basement of the San Francisco Public library, anti-prostitution researcher Melissa Farley (2004) sits next to representatives from the San Francisco and Oakland police departments and the executive director of Standing Against Global Exploitation, a local nonprofit organization that serves survivors of sex trafficking and collaborates with the police department to run a diversion program that educates men arrested for soliciting prostitutes about what police perceive as the harms of prostitution, sometimes conflated with sex trafficking. In the audience, sex workers with red tape covering their mouths sit in protest alongside local officials and service providers.

Farley rattles off statistics about the subjection of people in the sex trade to violence, and calls for police to rescue as many sexually exploited women as possible. She has distributed a handout to the audience, which contains a graphic representing different “sexually exploited” groups. The wider sections at the bottom of the pyramid, she explains, represent the majority of sexually exploited women, who she claims are the victims of daily rape and intimidation by pimps and johns. At the tiny triangle at the top of the pyramid, representing a minority of people in the sex trade, are what Farley calls “the sexually exploited elite,” who believe they are engaging in prostitution of their free will but are actually victims. This is how Farley dismisses the sex worker protestors, who she believes to be relatively privileged, but still victims of both sexual exploitation and false consciousness.

Next to me, the manager of a sex worker–run clinic that provides space for my own research interviews with people in the sex trade is tight-lipped behind the red tape. The clinic was not invited to participate in the panel. We exchange glances as Farley makes increasingly sensationalistic claims about prostitution as “paid rape,” ignoring the violence of poverty and criminalization and focusing solely on interpersonal violence perpetrated by clients. The solution, Farley claims, is more policing. But sex worker activists in the room have experienced firsthand how more policing causes serious harm to people in the sex trade, including the most vulnerable at the bottom of Farley’s pyramid.

These perspectives are not represented on this panel. Indeed, because of their close relationship with police and politically popular recommendations to funnel more local resources into law enforcement, anti-prostitution researchers like Farley have outsize influence in the policy arena. The red tape over the mouths of dozens of sex worker activists in the room signals that people in the sex trade are not voiceless, but silenced.

At the end of the panel, during the question and answer session, a few of the activists remove the tape to demand accountability for their exclusion from a panel about their lives. One woman gives an emotional speech about how sex work helped her to pull herself out of poverty and fear of arrest and incarceration creates stress and danger for her and for others. Others argue that the panel failed to distinguish between sex work and trafficking, disingenuously lumping all forms of sex trade involvement into the sensationalistic and nebulous term “sexual exploitation.” Other activists point out that the panel failed to address police violence, poverty, and other problems, contributing to the myth that the main source of harm for people in the sex trade is interpersonal violence perpetrated by buyers of sexual services. Each of the activists’ criticisms points to the problem of paternalism, epitomized by Farley’s twin assumptions: That she, as the researcher, knows what’s best for people in the sex trade, and that the exclusion of sex workers from the panel is natural and unproblematic. Farley’s is a brand of expertise that silences the voices of people most directly affected by the regulation of the sex trade.

Researchers who hope to help solve problems like sex trafficking must be mindful of the violent erasure and distortion of marginalized voices by more privileged “saviors,” a history rooted in colonialism (Flaherty 2016). At the heart of the protests against Farley are bigger questions about knowledge and narrative authority. The slogan, “nothing about us without us” does not only apply to criminological research. All ethnographers should take the critique by Poor News Network’s we-searchers seriously, should be haunted by bell hooks’s (1990) description of the colonial roots of research about marginalized groups:

No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer and the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343)

Researchers who hope to help solve problems like sex trafficking must be mindful of a history of violent erasure of marginalized voices by more privileged people who use their knowledge to subordinate others. All too often, professional researchers, policy makers, and other outsiders swoop in with the best of intentions to rescue groups of people directly affected by problems like poverty or police violence. Jordan Flaherty (2016) calls this phenomenon the “savior complex,” in which relatively privileged outsiders ignore definitions of problems and solutions by the groups of people most directly affected and instead impose their own will.

Research that presents only pain, and no agency, objectifies marginalized communities (Tuck and Yang 2014:228). Researchers seem to tell the researched: “Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks 1990, 343, cited in Tuck and Yang 2018:228). What does it mean for researchers to treat members of marginalized communities as people who can have a “voice of resistance,” an analysis worth engaging?

Cultural Humility as a Methodological Approach

Humility is a core value of ethnography. Unlike positivists, contemporary ethnographers generally acknowledge their own backgrounds and standpoints, and the ways in which these standpoints shape their perceptions and understandings of the world. This acknowledgment allows for an openness that is crucial for ethnographic research. Sustained ethnographic immersion has cast doubt on investigations by others whose more superficial contact leads them to false conclusions, as well as challenged ethnographers’ own initial assumptions (Parreñas et al. 2012; Hoang and Parreñas 2016). But there is more to humility than just gaining deeper and more accurate information.

As part of my research, I observed a number of protests against organizations serving homeless and trans people of color, where staff were predominantly white and middle class. The punitive and paternalistic policies of these service organizations reproduced social inequalities. At the same time, my research findings about the efficacy of peer-led service provision and advocacy led me to question my own role as a white, cisgender researcher from a middle-class background working in predominantly people of color, trans, and homeless spaces.

Elsewhere (Yarbrough 2016), I have discussed how many service providers at a peer-run clinic for sex workers drew on their own experiences working in the sex industry to destigmatize sex work and provide appropriate care. Providers who had never worked in the sex industry fight stigma by downplaying the role of service provider-as-expert and reimagining care as collaboration between providers and participants. The clinic’s twin approaches of rejecting medical authority and affirming expertise that comes from lived experiences of doing sex work, using drugs, being transgender, or experiencing homelessness politicized the process of service provision. Regardless of the degree of similarity or difference between their own backgrounds and those of clinic participants, providers practiced cultural humility, acknowledging the limits of their own knowledge and trusting clinic participants’ expertise about their lives.

Solidarity research can benefit from the lessons of providing services at a peer-run clinic. After learning about cultural humility as an approach to service provision, I adopted cultural humility as a methodological approach. Cultural humility as a methodological approach redefines knowledge as a dialogical process rather than an endpoint. This relieves the pressure to pretend we always knew what we know now: that we never held biases, preconceptions, or misguided political opinions. Instead, researchers can observe and document how our opinions and understanding shift through ethnographic fieldwork and with the guidance of our research participants or in dialogue with related social movements.

Cultural humility also necessitates that professional researchers of poverty incorporate marginalized groups’ analyses of their own lives. These analyses can be found in published material as well as ethnographic data. Research and analysis by homeless, sex worker, and transgender communities, no matter how rigorous or innovative, is rarely cited in academic literature. To disrupt these exclusionary ideas about expertise, I cite writing by sex worker and homeless scholars alongside peer-reviewed research in my academic writing.

Reading political protest as text is another way to center the political analyses of homeless and sex worker communities, showing that marginalized groups are not just objects but producers of knowledge. In this way, solidarity research departs from much of criminological research, which fails to engage with the political claims and agency of marginalized groups; extracts stories of suffering from their political context, and then reconstitutes them as fodder for the academic researcher’s own analysis. Engaging the political analyses of marginalized groups is a very different project from the extractive exotification of life stories for an academic audience. Cultural humility as a methodology is consistent with Black feminist theories of standpoint and situated knowledge (P. H. Collins 2000, 2016) and practices of “ethical encounters” that resist “stranger fetishism” and instead open possibilities for dialogue across difference (Ahmed 2000).

Against Extractive Exotification: Strategic Silences

Three years into my study and on the tail of a successful fundraising campaign that heightened the organization’s visibility, the peer-run clinic where I do research is besieged by emails from researchers. All of the prospective researchers want to interview street-based sex workers. The manager of the clinic is frustrated by these insistent and disrespectful requests, “You know, because we’re not a clinic that respects our participants’ privacy—we’re a zoo of customizable prostitutes” available for interviews at a researcher’s whim, he comments sarcastically. Staff and sex worker activists decide to compile a list of research and writing by sex workers, especially street-based sex workers of color, for these researchers to read, instead of disrupting the clinic.

In the clinic manager’s exasperated statement, the word “zoo” conjures animals, wild, inhuman, caged for examination and display to visitors who want to learn more about these exotic creatures. “Customizable” means that the researchers’ needs come first: prospective research subjects are there for researchers’ own edification and benefit. Research about poor people in general, and sex workers in particular, often exotifies, fetishizes, and presents unfamiliar lives for display and consumption, with no discernable benefit to the research subjects.

Rios (2011, 2015) criticizes the “jungle book trope,” in ethnographic research, in which research subjects (poor people of color portrayed as “savage”) take the outsider researcher in and “make him their king.” This outsider is then in a position to tell the exotic secrets of a community previously unknown to more privileged audiences, to the researcher’s benefit and, often, the detriment of the people being studied. Native scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) names this type of research as a colonial practice. What I call extractive exotification, in which the researcher (knowingly or unknowingly) exploits a close relationship with the research participant in order to gain and extract insider knowledge, is too common in ethnography. This isn’t because most ethnographers have bad intentions, but because as ethnographers immerse themselves in previously unfamiliar social worlds, they can forget to consider how where they came from has influenced their perceptions, and how where they’ll go with this new knowledge might harm the research subjects they’ve left behind.

Ethnographers are granted custody of stories that do not belong to us, and trusted to know how to shepherd them into the world. Ethnographers also have to contend with what Tuck and Yang call “the academy’s voracious hunger for the secrets” of marginalized communities (2014:233). Referencing IRB consent forms, Tuck and Yang argue that “permission is an individualizing discourse—it situates collective wisdom as individual property to be signed away” (233). When individual experiences are woven together in ethnographic accounts, they become something else that reaches beyond the researcher or the individual research participant. Because these are community stories, researchers can benefit from community input on decisions about who might benefit from their sharing and when strategic silence might more effectively achieve the goal of fighting oppression. I will give an example from my own struggles with deciding which information should be disseminated, and how.

In the final year of my fieldwork, one of my research participants, Melina, survived horrific interpersonal and state violence. As an activist, she wanted to share her story with as many people as would listen. As Melina recounted her experience, I felt numbness, despair, and indignation in rapid succession. I took careful notes on the specific details of her story, and on corroborating documents, resolving to help her expose the institutions responsible. She wanted me to write up and publish an article immediately, a companion piece to an advocacy video she planned to make and share on social media. She was part of a class action lawsuit against the government agency responsible, and I asked Melina if I could call her lawyer to ask about the timing and venues of publication. Melina’s lawyer told me not to publish what happened, even with identifying details changed. The lawyer also asked me to warn Melina not to talk to journalists or share her story on social media.

Talking with Melina about what her lawyer had said implied all sorts of questions: Did the story of her experience belong to Melina, or to all of the people who were targeted by the same institutions that harmed her? Was it ok for me to recommend that she adopt a certain political strategy? I felt conflicted: The decision wasn’t mine to make and I wanted to avoid giving advice, yet I also thought that a legal strategy would have the most transformative effects. I relayed the information from her lawyer, adding that it sounded to me like legal action would be the most immediate and forceful way to make change. The advice to wait was frustrating for Melina, who wanted to publicize her case as widely as possible. While both of us felt disappointed that we couldn’t fight back in the way Melina initially envisioned, we came to the conclusion that the story belonged to the collective of people who had been harmed, and that refraining from publicizing this story for the time being would be best.

This, and other close calls, combined with my continuing ambivalence about some of the questions above, made me realize how easy it would be to inadvertently expose a collective secret. Researchers feel eager to publish certain stories, partly because we believe that drawing attention to them can spark others who don’t yet know these stories to feel outrage, to do something to fight back. When we feel helpless, sad, or angry about injustice, writing can be therapeutic, as can imagining the future power of our words. At the same time, the academy demands disclosure, requires publication. Motivations and pressures tangle and blur together. Good intentions are not enough to prevent harm.

After the end of my fieldwork, reflecting on all that I was told, all that I witnessed, all that I dug deeper to find out, I needed help to know which stories to share and how. I needed readers who knew things that were different from what I knew, and who had been fighting against oppression for longer than I had been studying it. The people whom I asked to be part of my “research advisory group” are people who have years of direct experience advocating for and as sex workers, queer and trans people, and people of color. They are people who, while I was collecting data, helped me find safe spaces and ways to interview very vulnerable people. They allowed me to have quiet epiphanies, watched as assumptions that I didn’t even know I held were upended. They gave me room to absorb new information, ideas, and ways of thinking that I realized were different from my own. They are people whom I trust to confront harmful ideologies, to choose strategic silences, and to help me shepherd the stories that don’t belong to any one of us. Consulting community advocates isn’t a guarantee against mistakes. But a diversity of life experiences refracts ideas through a new prism, increases the likelihood of more valid conclusions, and more useful policy recommendations.

Research is a political act, and decisions about what to publish should be informed by a politics of solidarity with oppressed groups. I would never advocate cherry-picking data or lies of omission that slant findings to support political ideologies. These practices are antithetical to our goals as researchers. But the practice of strategic silence, described above, is very different. To avoid extractive exotification and unintentional betrayal of a marginalized group’s well-being, certain stories can and should be left unpublished.

One way to decide which details to jettison is to evaluate whether the stories are useful in understanding how state violence works and how we can fight back, or whether the stories merely satisfy outsiders’ prurient interest in how marginalized people survive. Christina Sharpe cites Frederick Douglass’s refusal to reveal his route North through the Underground Railroad even to allies, citing Douglass’s explanation that such “open declarations . . . do nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master. They stimulate him to greater watchfulness, and enhance his power to capture his slave” (Douglass cited in Sharpe 2014). If telling a story reveals what Sharpe (2014) calls “fugitive practices” in ways that increase authorities’ capacity for surveillance and harm, then that story should not be told.

Solidarity research requires accountability not just to individual participants but to the marginalized group involved in the research. Instead of extracting information and then leaving, or dismissing marginalized people’s analyses as “folk theory” that has no place in academic writing, researchers should take seriously the perspectives of participants through the process of data collection as well as the process of framing and disseminating findings.

Too often, truly reflexive and accountable research is thought of as the exclusive domain of Participatory Action Research in which responsibilities of study design, data collection, and data analyses are shared between academics and members of directly affected communities. For reasons of funding, organizational capacity, and individual and community needs, designing and carrying out a PAR project may not always be feasible, or may not be a top community priority. While oppressed groups are busy protesting in the streets, attending to daily survival needs, or providing life-sustaining services, individual researchers can still design accountable research projects that support these endeavors. Solidarity research requires that researchers consider benefits to participants in the process of data collection and analysis, as well as the dissemination of findings. Solidarity research also requires that researchers seriously engage with marginalized communities’ political analyses and social change goals. Sometimes this means changing the way we collect our data, conceptualize our projects, and disseminate our findings. For example, while an early research plan was shaped by a review of academic literature and grant funding requirements, conversations with my participants and my increasing involvement in antipoverty and decriminalization activism shifted my project to focus on the concerns that were most salient to my research participants. This shift in my research question came from the realization that what was most useful to study was not “sex work” or “homelessness,” but the social and political conditions that produce criminalization, economic insecurity, and housing deprivation. Beyond doing interviews and ethnography documenting the lives and experiences of people caught in systems of oppression, researchers must analyze those systems. As one academic researcher (Jello 2015) who has worked in the sex industry wrote in a blog post titled “Why You Shouldn’t Study Sex Workers,”

Most of the time, when you approach a sex worker organization with the intent of studying them, you are not helping them. You are helping yourself. The completion of your research, alone, helps your career, not sex workers. . . . Sex worker organizations are universally understaffed and underfunded, and they have shit to do. They exist to serve sex workers, not to serve you. Make this something you know beyond doubt, in the very fiber of your being: you are not helping us; we are helping you. . . . How do you repay this help that we are giving you? You make your research matter to us. Since just doing the research doesn’t help anyone but you, you need to do some extra work to make it useful to us. A direct benefit to sex workers is the necessary condition of doing research on sex work.

These guidelines can help academics reconsider not only the process of developing research questions and data collection approaches, but also established approaches to the framing and dissemination of research findings. As I write up the results of my study, discussing research findings with people who have experienced housing deprivation and worked in the sex industry helps me engage directly with perspectives that are systematically excluded from the academic literature. I also pay close attention to the political analyses put forth by activists, not just those who participated in my research but also activists whom I have never met. This means that I read and cite writing by sex workers and unhoused advocates alongside academic writing, and that I engage the voices of protestors, whose concerns and advocacy are often ignored or minimized in mainstream media as well as academic literature.

Solidarity as Critical Dialogue for Transformative Change

Sometimes calls for “inclusion” are rote, superficial, even tokenizing. That’s not what I mean here. I mean that we should write our ethnographies in dialogue with community organizers, with the goal of producing knowledge that is useful for advocates. This also means asking myself, consistently and repeatedly: How can my process of doing research benefit my participants? How can my findings benefit criminalized groups, especially people experiencing housing deprivation and people who are systematically excluded from accumulating wealth under racial capitalism? What can I do to ensure that my project is not one of surveillance or extraction, but of collaboration? How can I support and amplify marginalized groups’ political demands?

Angelica Camacho (2017) says: “I engage with the theorizing that emanated out of the Pelican Bay and California Prisoner Hunger Strike struggle, as opposed to studying the prisoners and families organizing as objects. A method that helps one listen to the voices from below, rather than study their particularities” (22). This approach, inspired by what Andrea Smith (2008) calls “intellectual ethnography,” recognizes research participants as producers of knowledge, as theorists in their own right rather than mere objects of inquiry. Citing the Zapatista slogan, “walking we ask questions,” Camacho argues for the compatibility of research and political action, and the importance of research as a process of learning to listen.

That we aspire to be “problem solvers” (Prasad 2018) or move forward asking questions, of course, does not mean that scholars should uncritically valorize participants’ political perspectives and ideologies. Uncritical agreement with anyone is antithetical to the purpose of academic research. Not to mention that the considerable heterogeneity among the political perspectives of research participants at most field sites also renders agreement with all participants’ ideas impossible. Solidarity does not require agreement, but dialogue in which researchers take seriously participants’ analyses, and note points of convergence with and departure from our own ideas (hooks 1984; Dean 1998a, 1998b; Fields 2013; Grieger and Nagar 2014).

Ethnographer Jennifer James (2016) has developed a method, based on Black feminist theories of standpoint and epistemology, of sharing ethnographic vignettes with participants and incorporating into her writing participants’ reflections on her initial renderings of their stories. James’s work shows how individual ethnographers can incorporate methodologies that facilitate collaborative and dialogical meaning-making, comparing their own analyses with those of their research participants. Differences of opinion with research participants are acknowledged, and generate even richer ethnographic analysis. In this way, James’s research exemplifies how a politics of humility and solidarity generate deeper and more nuanced analysis.

Solidarity Research in Practice

In the early stages of developing my study, I was fortunate to have research participants and staff members at a peer-led clinic for sex workers advise me about how I could support them in their daily lives and work. Ethnographers working with marginalized groups can support research participants by accompanying them as they navigate bureaucracies that are biased toward people with middle-class backgrounds. This type of “interventionist” research is common among clinical social workers (Comfort et al. 2015) and also practiced by many ethnographers in other social science disciplines (see Gowan 2010; Darling 2016; Greene 2018). Sometimes, participants asked me to speak as an official advocate at a shelter hearing or to help fill out confusing housing or benefits application forms. As part of the research process, solidarity can take the form of supporting participants’ struggles to meet daily survival needs. As I spent more time with some of my core participants, I accompanied them to appointments to apply for housing, health care, and General Assistance and advocated on their behalf. As I helped my participants navigate punitive poverty management institutions, I also learned more about how these institutions work to reproduce poverty. At the same time, I worried that using my unearned privilege to help navigate these situations could further disempower my research participants, so I followed their lead about when and how to present myself as an advocate.

At times, the fact that others perceived me as a nonprofit service industry professional allowed me to help participants “work the system” to maximize benefits. For example, being perceived as a service industry worker allowed me to advocate for my research participants in hostile institutions. When one of my participants, a transgender woman, remarked that the workers at General Assistance treated her better when I was there, we strategized about how each of us would act in the meeting, to increase her chances of scoring a bed at the shelter she wanted. Afterwards, she remarked drily: “They’re so much nicer with you here.”

While the disparity between how I was treated and how my participants were treated temporarily increased participants’ access to material benefits, it also illuminated the ways in which the institutions that manage poverty reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, and class. I could use my race, class, gender, and educational privilege to advocate for my participants in the short term, while critically interrogating the ways in which white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism produce and govern poverty as part of my scholarship and activism against institutional racism and transphobia.

Beyond supporting individual research participants, a politics of solidarity means supporting marginalized groups’ struggle as a scholar and an activist. When researchers who work with people experiencing poverty and marginalization are put in the position of experts, we must walk a delicate line in order to avoid affirming the academic norms of objectivity and professional credentialing that excludes marginalized groups from decision-making about issues that affect their daily lives. Solidarity research requires constant problematization of one’s own position as an expert, a stance that can feel contradictory in situations where academic credentials allow researchers to make the same claims as activists but to be more readily believed by policy and academic elites. Solidarity research means constant reflection about and negotiation of the role of expert, highlighting the academic rigor of our studies while demanding an end to exclusionary and paternalistic approaches that deny the expertise that comes from lived experience. For me, sometimes this meant invoking my academic credentials and speaking up, for example, in meetings with local government officials or police.

Just as importantly, it meant that I stepped back and recognized that I was in a position of learning. The siren call of academic expertise is hard to resist. Many ethnographers work with participants who misunderstand the causes of their own oppression, for example, poor whites who support right-wing extremism rather than multiracial solidarity against exploitation. Or (more commonly) research participants who blame only mean-spirited individuals, rather than identifying the systems and institutions responsible for their circumstances. Researchers frequently disagree with individual participants in our studies. But lamentations of “false consciousness!” aside, we can all find social movements led by people directly affected by the systems of oppression we’re studying. If I’m studying the effects of racism, or the prison system, I should engage the analyses and writing of the Movement for Black Lives. If I’m studying the criminalization of sex work, I should be in dialogue with movements for sexual and gender justice led by trans women of color and sex workers. Regardless of whether social movements are the subject of my research, I can read platforms written by community organizers and put my work in conversation with their demands for justice.

Tuck and Yang (2014) argue that the academy generally “stockpiles examples of injustice, yet will not make an explicit commitment to social justice” (233). Solidarity research asks academic researchers to make this commitment, through dialogue, with humility and commitment to contributing to transformative solutions in ways that respect the labor and leadership of the people who are most directly affected by these problems.

In her seminal piece on “coauthorship,” which she describes as collaborative writing and thinking across social and economic divides, feminist scholar Richa Nagar notes:

Like collaborative writing, formulation of political ideas and intellectual concepts in a collective with open membership is a constantly evolving process. It is only by making space and nurturing this dynamism (which includes the risk of moving backward at times) that we can appreciate knowledge as being produced in both place and time, drawing upon diverse sources of experience and expertise, in ways that the fields of the academy, NGOs, and social movements can become means, not ends. (2014:103)

Dialogue can also help researchers to more accurately frame the experiences of marginalized participants. For many ethnographers who are dedicated to the well-being of research participants and marginalized people more broadly, a commitment to understanding and transforming conditions of oppression is central to our work. This requires extra effort to contextualize ethnographic observations. When I look at an early draft of my book manuscript, I see that I diligently and accurately documented life experiences and conditions of participants surviving poverty, people who I care about deeply. But I also reflect that we will never understand (much less end) poverty by studying poor people. Sometimes ethnographers get so caught up in “thick description” of the metaphorical tree, or even the forest, that we forget about the roots and the seeds. Consulting with people who are part of movements opposing oppression can help us contextualize the experiences we document, refocus our ethnographic gaze on the institutions and policies that produce poverty and injustice, not just the people who survive it. ² Advocates with years of experience working on a given problem often have a keen understanding of what information is missing and still needed: What do we need to know about the law, or budgets, or economies, or how institutions work to refine our targets for advocacy? Under what conditions might studying marginalized people’s experiences reveal the hidden workings of state power? Under what conditions might observation of how more powerful actors produce conditions of oppression be more useful? What else do I need to learn and write about to make my research useful to advocates? How can we refocus the ethnographic gaze on the state, and on the institutions responsible for producing harm?

Conclusion: Protests as Guidelines for Solidarity Research

Supporters of policies that expand criminalization cite the research findings of popular academic “experts,” like George Kelling and Melissa Farley. By taping their mouths shut, holding anti–broken windows “poverty scholar” conferences, and hosting debates with the authors of anti-trafficking legislation, poor people and those involved in street economies assert their voices in decisions about policies that affect their daily lives.

These protests aren’t just about the rights of outsiders to produce knowledge about homeless people or sex workers, but about the way in which outsider academic and elite voices and perspectives are legitimized over those of the people who are directly affected by the policies.

In all of these protests, activists not only challenge policies created without the input of directly affected communities, they also challenge dominant notions of expertise and objectivity. “Nothing about us without us,” is a rallying call against research that objectifies and excludes marginalized groups, especially poor people in street economies.

Academic researchers of poverty and marginality should take this call seriously. For decades, social scientists have focused primarily on poor people and their lives, but we will never end poverty by studying poor people: The roots of poverty are political and economic. This doesn’t mean that ethnographers should stop writing about poor people’s lives and experiences, just that we should be particularly careful to investigate the systems and institutions that produce poverty and vulnerability and to ensure that our research is in dialogue with activists’ analyses. As these protests demonstrate, poor people are not voiceless, but are silenced by academic and political institutions. Rather than speaking on their behalf, professional researchers can amplify marginalized participants’ voices and encourage an audience that has historically ignored them to actually listen.

While I have argued that we can distill from protests against prominent criminologists broad lessons for research about poverty and inequality, these lessons are incomplete. I have identified some guiding questions and basic principles of dialogue, humility, and accountability to marginalized groups’ movements for social change, but solidarity research is something that each researcher must reimagine in the context of their own fieldsites. Decisions about what questions to ask and whether and how to collect, analyze, and report data are political. As political actors, researchers should ground their decisions about data collection and reporting in principles of solidarity with oppressed people. Ethics and practices of solidarity are emergent, as issues in every research project and at every stage from developing a research question to writing and publication, will raise new questions that researchers must answer in dialogue with participants and social movements. This article is not meant to provide comprehensive guidelines, but to spark reflection and discussion about ethics and practices of solidarity in social science research, and particularly ethnography. It is my hope that putting these protests in conversation with my ongoing journey as an ethnographer will aid others in critical reflection about their own work and about research more broadly.