Troubling calls for evidence: A critical race,class and gender analysis of whose evidence counts

Abstract

Writing in the spirit of feminist psychologists who have historically refused to narrow the gaze of our craft, I want to cast a critical eye on popular calls for ‘evidence-based practice’ and more specifically research epistemologies funded to produce such evidence. Surrounded by sprawling debris reflecting the gendered, raced, classed and sexualized collateral damage of economic and political crisis, I find it most peculiar that psychologists have eagerly answered calls for ‘evidence’ – without a pause for asking: Why now? Whose evidence counts? What kinds of evidence are being privileged? What are we not seeing? As psychologists seek to produce ‘evidence’ of program effectiveness in contexts of huge inequality gaps in which state supports are being cut, funding streams, publication mandates, Impact Factors and high tier journals actively encourage researchers to narrow our focus on a discrete set of standardized indicators, drawn from random assignment of ‘subjects’ to ‘conditions,’ thereby whiting out the non-random cumulative landscape of injustice, resilience and resistance.

Keywords

evidence feminist psychology participatory methods violence against women

Chile, Turkey, the United States, Israel, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom are now listed among the top 10 nations for inequality. This article considers the debt of feminist psychology in neo-liberal times to attend systematically to the rugged landscape in which women in poverty, women of color, indigenous women and immigrant women struggle to survive. With an intersectional analysis of whose evidence is perceived as (il)legitimate, what kinds of evidence are being funded and privileged and what forms of evidence are deemed beyond the bounds of our psychological analysis, this article challenges the forces that aim to shrink our critical gaze and is written, instead, in the legacy of feminist psychology designed to cultivate wide angle evidence for outrage, protest and justice.

Budget cuts hit the vulnerable hardest … funding to address domestic violence has increasingly been targeted in light of tight budgets at the federal, state and local level. Three quarters of shelters nationally report losing money from government sources since the recession … 80 percent of shelters nationwide reported an increase in domestic violence cases for the third straight year. Three out of four shelters attributed the violence to victims’ financial issues; almost half said that those issues included job loss and 42% cited the loss of a house or car. More than half of shelters also report that domestic abuse is more violent than it was before the crash. The recession is taking its toll and it’s sadly not surprising. Studies show that abuse is three times as likely to occur when a couple experiences financial strain; when a man experienced two or more periods of unemployment over a five year study, he was almost three times as likely to abuse his female partner. (Covert, 2011)

The aggressive twinning of recession and the slashing of the public programs has unleashed a muscular policy assault on women, targeting particularly poor women, women of color, indigenous and immigrant women. The effects can be viewed globally, and also, as Covert suggests, locally. Heightened structural and domestic violence, in contexts of hollowed budgets and shredded social safety nets, leave women few alternatives but to remain in violent homes. Were that bad enough, the feminist project would be clear. We would be mobilizing, as so many are, for the forgotten 99%, for diminished inequality gaps, and for gendered, racial and class justice.

But there is an ironic and troubling shadow discourse that undergirds the cumulative disenfranchisement of the poor. Despite the ample display of race, class and gender based troubles, worsened by economic crisis and the shuttering of social programs, we hear ritualized calls for ‘rigorous evidence’ to determine ‘if’ programs work and to sanction their closure when they don’t. It seems ironic that in desperately unequal times, when neo-liberal regimes are cutting programs, particularly for women and more particularly for women of color, an expansive industry of evaluation and accountability firms is flourishing, funded handsomely by public subsidies, documenting the conditions under which state interventions are (and more often are not) ‘working.’ In a culture of gendered austerity and then racialized and classed punishment, psychologists are being recruited, I fear, to create a science of banal dispossession – to engage in the systematic collection of evidence that demonstrates (usually) that State programs don’t make up for historic and cumulative oppression, legitimating the slashing of the safety net.

In times of swelling inequality gaps: The troubling insistence on ‘evidence’

In Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (OECD, 2011), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reports:

In OECD countries today, the average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10% – a ratio of 9 to 1. However, the ratio varies widely from one country to another. It is much lower than the OECD average in the Nordic and many continental European countries, but reaches 10 to 1 in Italy, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom; around 14 to 1 in Israel, Turkey, and the United States; and 27 to 1 in Mexico and Chile. (p. 22)

Economic tremors of neo-liberalism, manifest through inequality gaps, can be felt distinctly across the globe in terms of the accumulation of privilege by elites and the dispossession of more marginalized communities severed from capital, resources, opportunities, entitlements and hope (Harvey, 2004). While local variation is likely to be wide, one dynamic seems to bleed predictably across contexts: the fallout of economic crisis, and even recovery, is always gendered, raced and classed.

As the US invests in war(s), mass incarceration, human ‘insecurity’ and deportation, bails out banks and investment houses and refuses to equitably tax the wealthy and corporations, national, state and local governments are slipping into austerity, retreating from social welfare across a vast range of fields including public education, libraries, welfare, jobs and public employment. In the US, since the recession ‘ended’ in 2009, women have lost more jobs than men lost while the economy was contracting prior to 2009. The intersectional analyses are even more telling:

The recovery has proceeded uniformly for men across race, ethnicity and nativity – the unemployment rate has dropped for all groups of men. Among women in the recovery, the unemployment rate for white women decreased, but it increased for Hispanic, black and Asian women. (Kochhar, 2011)

The economy in the US may be slowly recovering on the backs of poor women of color and their families.

Accompanying these structural transformations, there is a discursive and psychological re-orientation toward privatization, punishment and scientific scrutiny. Public concerns are being strategically re-presented and recast as private troubles, stuffed back into the private zone of individual choice, the home and the family. In 1961, C. Wright Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination (2000, p8) in which he argued that the task of social science is to ‘translate private troubles into public issues.’ Today we witness public issues being exiled from the public sphere and returned to the province of private troubles. When social supports for families and communities are cut as ‘waste,’ national, state and local safety nets shred. The gender/ethnicity nexus dilates as an ever widening trough catching the downward flow of redistributed responsibility, blame and surveillance (Yuval-Davis and Werbner, 1999). Political and scientific scrutiny intensifies as girls and women grow inflated with social responsibility to care for those whom the State has betrayed (Fine and McClelland, 2007).

Drawing on Melanie Klein’s (1984[1932]) trope of women’s breasts as the contested site for social reproduction, Sarah Carney and I (Fine and Carney, 2001) have written on the weight of breasts as psychoanalytic object within the political economy of early 21st century neo-conservatism. We argue that breasts swell on the bodies of daughters, mothers, wives, lovers, granddaughters, neighbors and sisters when the State relinquishes social and political responsibility for human welfare. That is, when the government refuses to attend to human needs and rights, the ideology of the family circulates vociferously. Women are recruited as responsible to fill the void.

In her essay ‘Responsibility as masochism,’ Frigga Haug (1992) analyzes critically, some would say harshly, women’s willingness to take on these cascading (over) responsibilities and guilt for family life. Drawing on her analytic work in Germany, Haug argues that women ingest and embody a form of masochism once they/we accept the labor of human reproduction and sustenance along with the shame and the burdens of care that stretch endlessly to occupy the vast emotional and relational space of social responsibility voided by the State. She writes:

individual responsibility always appears when general rules stop working .… female responsibility is a mistake, a social deprivation which points to a general disorder in society. What is being neglected here are the basic elements of physical well being. This disorder consumes human energies. (p. 81)

And then she asks,

Do these reflections really have any bearing on the question of female masochism or with what manifests itself as such? Women are positioned[?] at the meeting point of individual lives and the exorbitant claims of society and acquiesce without flinching. They would rather be torn apart than give up … this unreasonable responsibility. They experience this state of being torn apart as personal guilt. They take this guilt upon themselves. The humanity which thereby enters their actions covers up the inhumanity of society at large. Thus women contribute to the reproduction of their own necessary being as these particular women and in so doing they assist in the very process that tears them apart. (p. 84, bold added)

As social responsibilities drain downward toward a bevy of women, however, the distributions of blame, surveillance and punishment are of course uneven. A cultural splitting occurs whereby the ‘good responsible, conforming, assimilating, grateful woman is distinguished from the ‘bad, non-compliant, dangerous woman. Today, media and popular ideologies reflect and reproduce the binaries of good women and bad. Poor women, women of color, marginalized women who ‘fail’ to fulfill mounting piles of responsibilities are being disciplined and punished publicly, in courts and in the media:

Grieving Mother Faces 36 Months In Jail For Jaywalking After Son Is Killed By Hit-And-Run Driver. Nelson was crossing a busy Marietta, Georgia, street with her son and his two siblings when they were struck by a hit-and-run driver. Jerry Guy, who later admitted he had been drinking and had taken painkillers the night of the accident .… Nelson had taken her children with her to shop for groceries and supplies for her upcoming birthday party. The working mother and college student regularly took public transportation … Nelson’s apartment complex sits across the street from the bus stop, but the nearest crosswalk is three-tenths of a mile away … She crossed one side of the divided highway to the median, where she waited for a break in the traffic. Several people then crossed the street before Nelson thought it was safe. She waited with her kids. But when others started to move towards the road, Nelson’s son must taken it as a cue it was time to go. She felt his grip on her hand loosen and he darted out into the road. She followed. Guy’s car struck Nelson, her son and her daughter, and the boy died … As Guy was processed by Georgia’s criminal justice system … the Atlanta Journal-Constitution [ran a story which] mentioned Nelson and her son, pointing out that she hadn’t been charged with any crime. Three days later, the Georgia Solicitor General’s office charged Nelson with the three misdemeanors. Nelson, a black woman, was convicted by an all-white jury. She relies on public transportation; she is a pedestrian in a car-oriented Atlanta suburb. During jury questioning, none of the jurors who would eventually convict Nelson raised their hands when asked if they relied on public transportation. (Balko, 2011)

Splitting is neither random nor arbitrary; it places the burden of proof and the heel of punishment squarely on poor women of color, abandoned by the State even as they try to sustain and honor their families, care for their children, be the architects of a bit of human security, shelter and dignity.

As neo-liberalism realigns the State and global capitalism redistributes opportunity and need, we witness the cultural hyper-responsibilization and scrutiny of women, particularly women of color, surrounded by echoing calls for evidence. In this political context, four questions should be on our collective feminist minds:

Whose evidence counts?

Why now?

What evidence counts?

In the name of science, what pieces of human tragedy, resilience and protest are being scientifically excised from public understanding of the structural assault on girls’ and women’s lives?

Whose evidence counts? Intersectionality and (il)legitimacy

Drawing on excerpts from an article in Newsweek magazine (Dickey and Solomon, 2011):

‘Hello? Housekeeping.’ Diallo glanced around the center room of the hotel suite … [a] naked man with white hair caught her by surprise. ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ ‘You don’t have to be sorry …’ He grabbed her breasts. He slammed the door … ‘Sir, stop this, I don’t want to lose my job,’ …

‘You’re not going to lose your job.’

‘He pulls me hard to the bed’ … He tried to put his penis in her mouth … Diallo kept pushing him away, ‘I don’t want to hurt him … I don’t want to lose my job.’ He shoved back, moving her down the hallway from the bedroom toward the bathroom … Strauss-Kahn … pulled up [her uniform] around her thighs and tore down her pantyhose, gripping her crotch so hard that it was still red at the hospital, hours later. He pushed her to her knees, her back to the wall. He forced his penis into her mouth, she said and he gripped her head on both sides. ‘He held my head so hard here … he was moving and making a noise. He was going like ‘uhh, uhh, uhh.’ He said, ‘suck my – I don’t want to say.’ The report from the hospital where Diallo was taken later for examination notes that ‘she felt something wet and sour come into her mouth and she spit it out on the carpet.’

‘I got up’ Diallo told NEWSWEEK. ‘I was spitting. I run. I run out of there. I don’t turn back. I run to the hallway. I was so nervous; I was so scared. I didn’t want to lose my job.’

[S]he hid around the corner in the hallway near the service lobby and tried to compose herself. ‘I was standing there spitting. I was so alone. I was so scared.’

Many aspects of Diallo’s account of the alleged attack are mirrored in the hospital records, in which doctors observed five hours afterward that there was ‘redness’ in the area of the vagina … and pain to the left shoulder. Weeks later, doctors reexamined the shoulder and found a partial ligament tear … DNA evidence in suite 2806 – the result of all that spitting that mingled the maid’s saliva and Strauss-Kahn’s sperm – makes it virtually impossible to deny there was a sexual encounter between Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Diallo.

At the time of the alleged assault, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. At age 62, he was also the much touted potential presidential candidate in France. Nafissatou Diallo was a maid in the Hotel Sofitel, mother of a 15 year old daughter, age 32, an asylum seeker living in the Bronx. She had arrived from Guinea in 2003.

A systematic analysis of media coverage reveals an early flurry of reporting about Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, followed almost immediately by a media carnival accusing Nafi Diallo of prostitution, having HIV/AIDS, being undocumented, lying about her taxes, having unsavory friends. Within a week, local news articles provided graphic details, often exaggerated, of her biography: conditions under which she secured asylum status, her tax records, taped (and translated) phone calls to a man in prison in Arizona.

The media chronicled her ‘inconsistencies’ – not atypical of a mother trying to survive in the shadows of immigration, poverty and housing insecurity in New York City. She is accused of lying about a gang rape in her home country which enabled her to establish asylum-worthiness in the U.S. Apparently she ‘hangs out’ with ‘unsavory characters’ including men who are in prison for dealing drugs. She may have falsified some tax documents so she would be entitled to additional welfare payments. Her credibility was under siege.

At a press conference called by Diallo’s supporters in July, demanding simply that the District Attorney take the case, the panelists were African American and African men and women standing in solidarity with Diallo’s right to go to trial. Local clergy, an Iman, a woman from 100 Black Women from Harlem, State Assemblyman Bill Perkins and others spoke. No one prejudged the verdict or the evidence; they advocated going to trial. The audience of mostly White and predominantly French journalists peppered them with questions including, “Have you seen the medical evidence? Do you know that the forensic evidence actually showed semen on the carpet?” An obviously frustrated man who introduced himself as a retired police officer and member of One Hundred Black Men in Uniform responded:

All we are saying is to take this case to trial. We are not here to accuse or render judgment. Your question, however, I find offensive. Would you have asked those questions of the Central Park jogger case, where the woman was White and the accused boys were Black? Asking for the medical records is like demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. None of this needs to be proven before a trial; these are the materials that would be submitted during the trial. (Personal communication, July 2011)

On August 23, 2011, the New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance decided to drop all attempted rape charges against Strauss-Kahn because Diallo was considered ‘not credible.’ Strauss-Kahn acknowledged that he and Diallo engaged in a ‘quick consensual sexual act’ that morning. According to the French article LePoint, Anne Sinclair, Strauss-Kahn’s wife, allegedly told a friend that her husband ‘is a seducer, not a rapist’ and that he ‘had’ three women that weekend, in preparation for his presidential bid (NewsCore, 2011).

The forensic and medical evidence were, however, uncontested.The Diallo–Strauss-Kahn case refracts light on the too familiar intimate dynamics of privilege, blame and violence. A global citizen well known for sexualized aggression toward women is free, and a woman with no nation of her own is betrayed, again, by the State.

Like semen on a maid’s uniform and on a carpet, the aggressive assertion of vast personal responsibility for structural troubles trickles down, tastes sour and stains the lives of those most vulnerable, while elites seem to be wrapped in protective cellophane. If only the carpet could speak …²

What evidence counts?

While the Diallo–Strauss-Kahn criminal case exemplifies a disturbing and complex instance of evidence doubly ignored (his and hers), and a distressing account of whose evidence curdles to (il)legitimacy, I want to turn now to a seemingly banal question of method: in times of rising inequalities, carved through gender, race and class, what counts as evidence and what aspects of women’s lifescape are being excised from view by calls for ‘rigorous’ design?

In a forthcoming essay in the Journal of Social Issues (Fine, forthcoming), I argue that American and European social psychology seem to be betraying, once again, our radical Lewinian lineage of studying the broad topography of human life-space. Instead, in scientific synchrony with neo-liberal shrinkage of the state, dominant methodologies systematically strip women (and men) of the material and political contexts of their lives; randomly assigning them to condition and/or assessing their outcomes on standardized indicators deemed appropriate by ‘experts’.

As Danzinger (2007) and Teo (2011) have argued, methodology is never neutral. Relentless calls for high stakes accountability regimes, mandates for evidence-based practice and Randomized Clinical Trials torque our social scientific and popular gaze away from the tumultuous and explicitly non-random landscape of inequality gaps, the burdens and scars distributed onto the bodies of poor women and women of color. These prescriptions for ‘rigor’ readjust our scientific gaze toward a discrete set of outcomes, within a structured design, where the noise, chaos, keloids and terror of life at the bottom have all been sanitized away. Let us consider how these epistemological mandates bend feminist practice and research so as to be out of touch with the lives of poor women and the dangling structural dangers to which they are most vulnerable (Levant and Silverstein, 2005). But before we proceed …

True confession: This is not a rant against experimental methods. Thirty years ago, my first book was entitled Social Experiments (Saxe and Fine, 1981). This is, however, a passionate reflection on construct validity in the vortex of inequality gaps, what it means to take up critical feminist research informed by and not silent on history, politics, economics and social dynamics, in neo-liberal times.

Random assignment when violence against women is anything but random

As the opening quote suggests, in the field of violence against women, four things are true: gendered violence is on the rise; the most reliable streams of funding are handcuffed, so to speak, to prosecution and criminalization; programs/supports for women and their families are on the decline; and evaluation scrutiny and sustainable funding have been systematically harnessed to a set of decontextualized indicators.

Maria Torre and I at the Public Science Project of the Graduate Center, CUNY, where researchers and activists gather to design participatory action research projects for social justice were recently asked by a small coalition of directors/advocates/participants in rural and urban domestic violence programs to convene a ‘quiet’ meeting to discuss openly their experience of evaluation pressures. A few of the women explained that federal and foundation funding depends routinely on their willingness to standardize their programs in order to document ‘what works’ for purposes of generalizability; to ‘test’ their interventions via the random assignment of women to intervention or control group to establish internal validity, and/or to participate in a cross-program common assessment documenting the number of women who call the police, agree to prosecute, apply for Orders of Protection, leave their abusers permanently, improve parenting and self efficacy skills and report lower depression scores.

Over a series of meetings, the directors, advocates and some of the women themselves, speaking off the record, elaborated on the complexities of leaving or obtaining an Order of Protection or calling the police in the midst of recession, mortgage and unemployment crises. They detailed the knotty intimacies of violence, love, poverty, homelessness and fear; the rising rates of intimate murder after a woman leaves. An advocate working with women from Central America told us it’s impossible to call the police or leave if a woman is undocumented and the man is a citizen. A program director working with orthodox Jewish survivors agreed with an activist working with lesbian women that many women can’t turn to their families of origin for support. First Nation women from Canada told us that they struggle within their community even talking about these issues, much less sending a Native man to ‘white man’s prison.’ Caribbean, African and African-American women know they risk losing custody of their children if they call the police, for fear of being charged with ‘engaging in domestic violence.’ Directors detailed the particular obstacles faced by women who have HIV, or those who fear more violence in their local homeless shelter.

We learned that women living in communities under intensive police surveillance – immigrant, low income, indigenous and other ‘minority’ women – narrate substantial ambivalence about contacting the police to resolve desperate matters of intimate violence; ambivalence about calling police, prosecuting and even securing protection orders because of the pernicious collateral damage exacerbated by police intervention.

Alisa Del Tufo, who has worked for decades in urban New York City and now rural Vermont on domestic violence advocacy and policy, explains:

One of the most absurd indicators of success for victims of intimate violence is the Order of Protection. In fact it is used as a litmus test to determine the ‘seriousness’ of the violence and her intent to stay away from the abuser. What it most often does is open a woman up to a dizzying array of potentially negative consequences from deportation, loss of housing, child welfare investigations, custody disputes, extended time needed to attend court hearings, job loss, intensified intimidation from the abuser with little or no hope of real protection from authorities. It is little wonder that fewer than 20% of women murdered by their partners have Orders of Protection! And yet OPs are often a pre-requisite to obtaining other services such as public housing, welfare to work waivers, satisfying child welfare investigations and sometimes even shelter itself. (Personal communication, 2011)

With similar concerns, sociologist Beth Richie (1996, 2011) reports that while the mainstream violence against women movement in the US has met with substantial legal success and institutional support over the past 25 years, communities of color have been besieged by a dramatic rise in men of color, particularly Black men, going to prison for domestic violence, but also Black women for ‘engaging in domestic violence’ and their children removed from the home because their mothers ‘exposed them to domestic violence’ (Richie, 2011). In the gender vs race intersect against violence against women, as is often true in the US, rac(ism) has won, sweeping in a dramatic rise in prosecutions.

Since that time, feminists of color have mobilized powerfully against exclusive reliance on the criminal justice system to respond to violence against women. Ironically, the mandated indicators of program impact are precisely the indicators that feminist of color are contesting. To be clear, these directors, advocates and researchers are not against evidence or accountability. Indeed, they have been fighting for decades for strong programs which are accountable to women, children and communities, and for race/gender justice. It is important to contest the differential enforcement and impact of a prosecutorial response by race, ethnicity, class, immigration status and sexuality; the hegemony of scientific designs and measures generated by outside ‘experts’; that people who know little about culture or violence or intersectionality are deciding which pieces of ‘evidence’ signify program success, without learning about or attending to local rhythms of context, danger and the strategic maneuvers women engage to survive both State and interpersonal violence (see APA Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice, 2006; Silverstein LB and Auerbach CF, 2009).

In these contexts, the elegance of the experimental design and standardized indicators (perhaps unwittingly) normalize a scientific dissociation from the complexities of living in poor and working class America, not unlike the legal denial of the struggles that define Nafi Diallo’s life circumstances and therefore tainted her ‘credibility.’

In the name of scientific rigor, it seems clear that decontextualized research and evaluations hurt the most vulnerable women first, by misrepresenting their circumstances, mandating outcomes that may place them in harm’s way and by generating data suggesting that these programs ‘don’t go far enough’ and perhaps qualify as State funded ‘waste.’

There is, of course, no easy exit from the structural conditions or scientific inducements of neo-liberalism that define our current historic moment – especially for feminist psychologists committed to gendered and racial justice. The designs, methods, the preferred indicators upon which we rely and our scholarly products are all being strategically disciplined, in the Foucauldian sense of the word, by a series of political forces impinging on our work: pressure to secure federal grants (with large overheads to support our increasingly starved higher education institutions); research funding from Big Pharma, the military and private foundations who contract for (and therefore own and may decide not to publish) the data; requirements that academics publish in ‘top tier’ journals which tend to be more conservative and dismissive of feminist, critical race or post-colonial work; the pernicious calculations of Impact Factors for promotion and tenure, encouraging young scholars to publish in traditional lineage, using standardized measures, following the intellectual grooves passed down, so that those who come next will cite you.

To the extent that feminist psychologists conform passively to these mandates of narrow indicators and random assignment, without attending also (or instead) to history, structure, privilege and the bloody and buoyant life spaces of inequality, soon our journals will be filled with articles that cleanse the complexity of lives across time and space. Soon enough the hard, untenable and disturbing portraits of women’s survival in the weeds of inequality will be fully erased, mowed down and exiled from the stories we tell in psychology.

There is, therefore, an urgent need for collective, intentional resistance, vibrant dialogue and an expanded, radical imagination for critical, feminist, post-colonial psychological inquiry in and for ‘revolting’ times (Macleod and Bhatia, 2008; Phoenix, 2009).

Reclaiming evidence: A project of critical feminist science

Neo-liberalism, in romantic embrace with dominant strains of psychology, may be trying to (con)script the stories psychologists can tell about women’s lives. But feminist psychology has historically spoken with a radical voice of protest, an epistemological tradition of refusing shrinkage, a theoretical commitment to speaking back and a methodological taste for delicately braiding science and politics (Bhavnani, 2006; Bhavnani et al., 2003; Braun and Tiefer, 2010; Clarke and Braun, 2009; Fox et al., 2009; Gavey, 2011; Lykes, forthcoming; McClelland, 2010; Macleod and Bhatia, 2008; Phoenix, 2009; Stainton Rogers, 2009; Torre, Fine, Stoudt and Fox, 2012). In small and large ways, critical feminist psychologists have always been among the few who travel between increasingly segregated worlds of wealth and poverty, oppression and resistance, pain and laughter, damage and survival. The stories we tell actually matter. We document the secret, and well known, underbelly of racial, gendered, sexual and classed domination. In the spirit of Marie Jahoda (1993) who served time in prison for her political commitments, feminist psychologists have a responsibility to radically reclaim ‘evidence’ (see Appendix for ‘tips’ for critical feminist psychologists interested in generating evidence for justice).

Toward this end, those of us at the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center, CUNY (www.publicscience.com) have crafted a set of commitments for a critical psychology imbued with strong feminist epistemologies. These commitments reflect a humble attempt to resuscitate a long (and buried) tradition of politically engaged psychology for social justice; a feverish desire to ‘Occupy’ psychology with a solidarity for public science and action, and a dedicated recognition of the debt owed by public higher education to the working people of our communities. Thus we have committed to:

Solidarity studies. Our projects – on queer youth and the police, incarcerated women and college, children of mothers in prison, youth activism and video, sexuality, violence against girls and women and educational injustice – are all forged and developed in solidarity with activist youth/feminist/queer/community organizations, and designed to generate materials/performances for varied justice campaigns.

Critical participatory methods. Our projects are, however, not only generated with activist allies, but the research is conducted by and for diverse collectives of researchers (academics, youth, elders, prisoners, educators, activists, lawyers, bodega owners …). Rejecting neo-colonial methods that tell people what outcomes are significant for their well being, critical participatory methods are rooted deeply in the recognition that a sweet and under-appreciated strain of expertise is intimately nourished at the bottom of social hierarchies; that knowledge of injustice is widely distributed even if legitimacy is not; that research questions must thereby be shaped by those who have paid the greatest price for injustice; that strong objectivity is strengthened in ‘contact zones’ (Torre and Fine, 2011) where very different kinds of experiences and knowledges engage in sustained dialogue; that research should be crafted for action, for change, in collective struggle (Lykes and Coquillon, 2009).

Theorizing circuits of dispossession and resistance. Finally, on the question of theory, our projects are designed to trace how circuits of dispossession, the social psychological capillaries of disinvestment, despair and resistance, migrate from political formations through to lives, bodies, relationships, institutions, communities and, for some, social movements of protest (Fine and Ruglis, 2008; www.publicscience.com). Our projects do not fetishize or scrutinize only those at the bottom of social hierarchies (as ‘victims’) or those at the top (as ‘perpetrators’). Further, we do not believe anyone to be a bystander or witness to social injustice. Instead, we seek to document the sprawling historic and contemporary stretches of injustice and contestation; the circuits that link privilege and marginality; structures, histories and lives; dispossession and resistance. While we have written about a ‘circuits analysis’ and ‘dispossession stories’ (Weis and Fine, forthcoming), we are also committed to documenting and using participatory action research to cultivate circuits of resistance, and mobilization across communities, identities and place.

With these three commitments to a critical feminist science – to solidarity, to wide angle theorizing of dispossession and resistance and to critical participatory methods – we resist scientific myopia on those who carry the scars of injustice, reject the equation of expertise and outsider-ness, nurture the wisdom cultivated in the soil of injustice and turn a wide-angle lens on the political, economic, ideological and social psychological landscape of dispossession and privilege (see Appendix for 10 ‘tips’ for critical feminist psychology).

Epilogue

During July of 2011, at the Graduate Center at CUNY, the Public Science Project sponsored our first (now annual) critical participatory action research institute for teams of community and university based activists and researchers, working on varied research campaigns, e.g. prison abolition, economic justice, first nation health care, violence against women, housing rights, education, queer justice, immigrant rights. We received more than 200 applications for 50 spots, without advertising. Community based activist research teams came together to work for an intensive week on critical PAR – ethnography, visual methods, critical statistics, embodied methods, participatory surveys, focus groups, performance – to reconstruct social theory, to feed political organizing campaigns, to challenge social policy and to cultivate quiet, delicate intra-community conversations about gendered dynamics within already marginalized communities. Linked with social justice and human rights movements around the globe, it is clear that there is a yearning for public, participatory, post-colonial feminist science to gather evidence for justice; to document the bloating of elite wealth, the hollowed welfare state and systematic violations of human rights; to capture the brilliance and laughter of women’s incredible commitments to carry on, and to feed radical movements for worlds not yet imagined.

It’s time to reclaim evidence to reveal and resist the grotesque and the banal injustices metasticizing in the lives of girls and women and to turn up loud the sweet music of protest echoing across the globe.

Footnotes

Notes

Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology, Women’s Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY and is a founding faculty member of the Public Science Project (PSP). A consortium of researchers, policy makers and community activists, PSP produces critical scholarship “to be of use” in social theory, policy debates and organizing movements for educational equity and human rights. Recent books and policy monographs include Charter Schools and the Corporate Make-Over of Public Education (Teachers College Press, 2012, with Michael Fabricant), Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion (with Julio Cammarota, Routledge, 2008), Muslim-American Youth (with Selcuk Sirin, New York University Press, 2008), and Working Method: social research and social justice (Routledge, 2004, with Lois Weis), and “Changing minds: The impact of college on women in prison,” nationally recognized as the primary empirical basis for the contemporary college in prison movement (2001). Fine has provided expert testimony in a number of ground breaking legal victories including women’s access to the Citadel Military Academy and in Williams v. California, a class action lawsuit for urban youth-of-color denied adequate education in California. Fine is the recipient of the 2012 Henry Murray Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the APA, the 2011 Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the 2010 Social Justice and Higher Education Award from the College and Community Fellowship for her work in prison. She was awarded the first Morton Deutsch Scholarship Award in 2005 and the Carolyn Sherif Award from the Division 35, Psychology of Women in 2001.

Appendix

References

American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force (2006) Evidence Based Practice in Psychology. American Psychologist, May–June, 61(4): 271–285.

Balko

(2011) Grieving mother faces 36 months in jail for jaywalking after son is killed by hit-and-run driver. Huff Press, 21 July. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/raquel-nelson-jail-for-jaywalking_b_905925.html.

Bhavnani

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