“Unpacking” Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Christina Weber, Associate Professor of Sociology, NDSU, and Project Director

As a sociologist, I am particularly interested in the ways in which war has an impact on the culture and structures of society. I am interested in this through the lens and experiences of individuals. The way people narrate and tell the stories of their lives can reveal a lot about how events and experiences of war come home and weave into the very fabric of our families and communities. I am not interested in war as a geopolitical event, so much as I am interested in war as a deeply personal and intimate experience that alters the way we think about ourselves, others, and the structures society.

Our second invited author in 2016 was Tom Bissell (2007), journalist and author of The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, who lectured and responded to audience questions about the possibility of moving forward after trauma. Bissell (2004) writes that, “Despite its remoteness, the war’s aftereffects were inescapably intimate. At every meal Vietnam sat down, invisibly, with our families” (p. 57). To tell the story of war through the eyes of a child trying to make sense of his father in his written work, and then talking to Bissell and hearing the story told again through the lens of the child-now-grown-man reveals the depth through which these stories ground his relationship with his dad. He told me that there are parts of his dad and the war that he will never be able to understand. We can never know everything about our parents, but the unique point here is that this relationship is constructed around an absence. It is constructed around something that he knows he can never know. And that what he can never know is inextricably linked to a war that was practically over by the time he was born. This is the power of our storied lives.

My work in Project Unpack has led me to delve deeper and develop my own understanding of storytelling sociology. Telling the story of Project Unpack means I need to discuss several key conceptual ideas that shape my scholarship and my personal relationship to war. The focus of storytelling sociology, as explained by Berger and Quinney (2005), emphasizes that “the measure of the ‘truth’ is judged not by conventional scientific standards of validity and reliability but by the power of stories to evoke the vividness of lived experience” (p. 9). Lived experience. Storytelling sociology takes us on a journey into the human experience that generates “‘empathy, makes it more difficult to marginalize others, [and] helps build social bonds’ (Duncan)” (p. 9). These are key goals in my part of the work. How can we learn to talk to each other about experiences that can be difficult to articulate, yet we so desperately want to tell others so they can know us? And how can we create spaces to hear stories, so we can know others?

Intersecting with storytelling sociology is object-oriented storytelling. The power of stories in our grant is not just held in the words that we narrate to each other. Through reading and discussion of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990), it became clear to me that storytelling, how we narrate our memories and remember our experiences and relationships, is deeply linked to the stuff we hold dear. Object-oriented storytelling did not become viscerally clear to me until I was sitting at a workshop held by Michael Strand and Josh Zeis at a local Fargo retirement facility. The workshop was attended by World War II veterans and family members. That day, I spoke with a woman who was the wife of a World War II veteran. She told me a story about a radio, an object that holds great power and importance in her life. She explained that her husband relied on this radio during time he spent in Texas recovering from the loss of his leg in war—for months, it was his only link to the outside world. The story of the radio was deeply woven into the family’s history. The woman lived in the retirement facility and her daughter was now the holder of the radio. The radio, though, gave the woman and her daughter a way of understanding the struggle and resilience of their husband and father. He was too far away for family to be with him and this was before their marriage and the birth of the daughter. The radio was an object that preexisted the relationships, but it was the foundation for them to understand their loved one. To think about him returning home with severe damage to his body and having to heal and recover without any emotional support aside from the radio is a story of pride and triumph in the family. The radio helped story their lives and create a shared space to understand something that, if we have not been to war, is just out of our reach. The story is constructed around something that they know they can never know. Without that radio, I wonder what kind of story I would have been told that day. I do not know if I would have heard about the triumph of this man and understand how deeply his love of music flowed. The story of her husband dancing with her, even though he had a prosthetic leg, was filled with joy and pride. I do not know if it would resonate quite the same if I were not sitting there with the radio. More to the point, I do not know if the story Hilda told would have emerged had I not worked with Michael to create a space where objects were the central focal point of our meeting. It was not until that experience that I recognized that something in the storytelling was altered. It is not that it was better or worse than the oral histories I collected. It was more that the storytelling found a clear focus that become the marker of the entire interview. The oral histories provided a wider breadth of information about the veteran and one could say that the object-oriented oral histories delved deeper into the experience and motions behind the experience.

Regardless, both storytelling sociology and object-oriented storytelling help us find a way into empathy. If there is a core guiding value within Project Unpack, it would be to seek empathy in our dialogues and exchanges. It is the place that, as collaborators, we were able to create Project Unpack. Empathy asks us to take the time to listen, not simply to get information, but to access something deeper in our ability to connect with each other. As Linker (2014) explains,

Intellectual empathy, then, assumes that reason and understanding must be supplemented with emotion and experience so that we can know in the fullest possible sense. This means knowing about ourselves and knowing as much as we can about other people’s circumstances, particularly people whose circumstances are different from our own. . . . It is a means for examining both the wide scope of social institutions and social inequality and the narrow scope of our own beliefs. (p. 13)

To hear and understand the power of the radio, one has to listen, not just for intellectual themes, but to listen in order to trace the flow of meaning that makes the radio not just a radio in that moment. In the moment of dialogue, the radio is a conduit into a world of experiences we know we can never know. Yet, we strive as we collect these stories. We also hope others will hear something that we might not hear. As a collective, Project Unpack wants the stories to be heard, so more stories can be told.

Alison Graham Bertolini, Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies

My primary role in Project Unpack has been to help members of the community process and understand the emotional truths of war, and the aftermath of war, through narrative. This might sound like a relatively straightforward process until we recognize how very many types of narrative there are. Our interdisciplinary methods of accessing the emotions and the residuals of traumatic experiences from those whom war has touched are unique, especially in the academy, because we encourage storytelling through objects, through writing, through oral histories, and through public lecture and discussion. Our primary belief, which is supported by theory that spans the arts, humanities, and social sciences, is that personal stories grant importance to the lived experiences of ordinary men and women and allow readers/listeners to empathize with other lives and other versions of truth. Moreover, according to Ronald J. Berger and Richard Quinney, narrative storytelling “is invoked in the art of healing, as a way of defining one’s journey through and beyond suffering” (p. 8).

Berger and Quinney write that during the last quarter of the twentieth century, storytelling has undergone a revival, and as such, is being recognized across the disciplines as an important form of social inquiry (p. 8). Storytelling sociology, they write, “is judged not by conventional scientific standards of validity and reliability but by the power of stories to evoke the vividness of lived experience” (Denzin, 1997, quoted in Berger and Quinney, p. 9). Such reasoning is paralleled by best-selling novelists of contemporary war fiction; for example, Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, a novel based on his experiences fighting the Vietnam War, writes, “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (p. 78). O’Brien insists that his text is fiction from beginning to end, yet is true in an emotional sense, and claims that it is this emotional truth that resonates the most with his readers.

Project Unpack has allowed me to guide participants through a critical social analysis of their emotional responses to narratives about war, to facilitate deeper personal and collective understanding. Tim O’Brien lectured at the NDSU campus in Spring 2016, following our first four months of grant work. During the semester prior to his visit, I hosted a community discussion of The Things They Carried at Fargo’s public library and additionally facilitated a writing workshop for veterans and their family members based on Tim O’Brien’s loose style of fictional memoir. Both events revealed the desire of veterans and community members to glean a deeper understanding of their own experiences with war, and the experiences of others. Finally, I assigned the text to my students in an undergraduate American Literature course.

Project Unpack assists veterans and family members who are dealing with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ¹ and/or the emotional upset of reintegration into their home communities after deployment and/or war. One way to achieve this is via discussion and critical analysis of war narratives, which as I have noted, provides a way into the emotional truth of unfamiliar situations. My role as discussion moderator is as variable as the stories I encounter and can quickly shift from assisting others with making sense of their own emotional responses by asking the right questions to one in which I break down the minute differences in our collective responses to demonstrate that even within a collective message (war is hell) we are only privy to bits and pieces of why people think so, small “soundbites” of experiences that give us a glimpse of the reality of others. My challenge is to facilitate discussion and analysis without imposing my personal beliefs onto the conversation; to bring participants to new awareness without privileging my own interpretations of narrative events. This is achievable by noting what is universal within the emotions that are evoked, while grounding the discussions firmly within the text and each individual’s interpretation of the words on the page.

When leading discussion of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I often begin by drawing attention to the first chapter of the novel, which is also the title chapter of the text. What do the men in this chapter carry into war in Vietnam? Why are these objects worthy of the narrator’s attention? What do the objects tell us about each of the soldiers? And finally, what would you carry into war, or, what do you carry with you on a daily basis? The narrator lists objects and emotions that the soldiers carry with them, both tangible and intangible and in no particular order, so that chess sets and basketballs are positioned as equally important as Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts. In this way, each of the men featured in the novel is introduced. Readers see each character not only as an individual, but also as part of the unit, each man differentiated solely by the objects he carries along. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, for example, carries pictures of his girlfriend, Martha; Henry Dobbins carries extra food and insecticide; Ted Lavender carries tranquilizer pills and fear; Kiowa carries a bible, moccasins, and a hunting hatchet. In the chapters that follow, O’Brien expands on these initial character descriptions, but in each case physical objects are symbolic of the man’s character. Finally, as the rolling tally of the weight of these objects increases, it becomes clear that the men do not just carry physical objects, but also heavy emotional burdens such as grief, love, remorse, and the weight of preserving “their own lives” (p. 15).

In Chapter One, Lieutenant Cross fixates on the photographs he carries of Martha. His fantasies allow him to temporarily escape the anxiety he feels about keeping his men alive. When one of his men is killed by a sniper bullet, Lt. Cross burns the photos in an attempt to lighten his load (p. 23); that is, to absolve himself of the guilt he feels about the death (p. 25). He resolves at the chapter’s end to dispense with love. He will become a war machine, he decides. He will, from this point onward, exhibit NO emotion, and will especially not indulge in fantasies of love. An in-depth discussion of this scene typically leads participants to new complexities of understanding about the meaning of burdens in this context, and their long-term ramifications.

Ironically, considering that Chapter One ends with Lt. Cross’s decision to entirely dispense with the emotion of love, Chapter Two of the text is titled “Love.” We thus are led to conclude that love is a human emotion that cannot be denied, despite our best efforts. In support of this inference, we learn that years later Jimmy Cross still loves Martha; that his love for her never wavered despite burning her photos and his decision to dispense with love. This juxtaposition of emotional extremes reveals an interesting facet of O’Brien’s narrative process and the way that he depicts “truth” in fiction. Our questions concerning authorial intent are reinforced when a few pages on, Jimmy Cross asks narrator O’Brien explicitly to “make him look good” in the fictive version of his story, which he knows O’Brien plans to tell. Just before O’Brien drives away, Jimmy Cross implores him NOT to mention a specific something that occurred while they served together. The reader does not know if this something has to do with Martha, the death of Ted Lavendar, or is about something else entirely. We will never know, because O’Brien is intentionally unclear. Instead, we must ask ourselves why O’Brien includes Cross’s request at all? So begins a discussion of the way in which real life can be “spun” in narrative to convey truth or falsehood; in other words, good storytelling requires the author to translate emotion, to incur empathy, rather than remaining strictly committed to a factual portrayal of events. This is often a revelation for participants/readers who are contending with the idea of authorial authority for the first time. Finally, and most cleverly, O’Brien titles the very next chapter “Spin,” as if to reinforce our conclusions that how something is told matters just as much, if not more so, than what is told.

Ultimately, this novel is an important component of my ongoing experience in Project Unpack, because it demonstrates that not all veterans are comfortable with the written word and suggests how and why people might prefer to express themselves via art or oral storytelling. This is where my work overlaps most significantly with that of my colleagues, Drs. Michael Strand and Angela Smith. Drs. Strand and Smith provide alternative venues for the sharing of stories, aspects of the project with which I became involved as much as possible. Because of my desire to hear firsthand about the personal experience of veterans of war in our community, I trained with Dr. Smith in how to most effectively conduct and record oral histories (the process of which she describes in more detail below). Similarly, I accompanied Dr. Strand during some of his multiple visits to retirement communities, during which he connected with veterans and their family members via artistic collaboration (which he describes in more detail below). Furthermore, I participated in a mask-making workshop, designed for veterans and their loved ones grappling with PTSD and/or the difficulties of reintegrating into their home communities after deployment. The workshop was led by [Amy Tichy, drama therapist]. My role was to provide short written prompts to aid each mask-maker in developing narrative to accompany his or her artistic creation. In such cases, it is the artistic work that tells the story, but the meaning of each object can be enhanced for viewers by providing context via narrative storytelling.

This, then, is just a taste of the way narrative story in multiple forms has constituted and sustained meaningful dialogues about war and its aftermath within Project Unpack. The expertise of our organizers from a variety of disciplines within arts, humanities, and social sciences has pushed me to personally integrate alternate narratives and conduits of story into community-based conversations about war. To conclude, Project Unpack has made clear to me that how people tell their stories is every bit as important as why they tell their stories and what they choose to tell. Those of us involved with Project Unpack are facilitating such conversations while making a variety of creative outlets accessible to American veterans. We simply provide veterans with creative outlets for their emotional pain and ensure that what they create is accessible to others. Sharing narratives about war trauma, whether via lecture, the written word, painting, pottery, masks, or oral memoir, can lead to growth and healing for the author, empathy for the reader/listener, and improvements in local and national policies and programs designed to help veterans and their family members better cope with the aftermath of war.

Michael J. Strand, Professor of Art/Design, Head of Visual Arts, NDSU

In considering my involvement in this project, I was primarily motivated by the subject of Veterans and legacy of war as an opportunity to cut across political divide through the recognition and honoring of service members and their families. As part of an interdisciplinary team, I collaborated directly with scholars in English, social sciences, and public history. This allowed me to extend my recent practice out of the “art realm” and into a truly multifield approach with an outcome that serves new and unique audiences.

So how does a potter fit into a project that aims to harvest and share stories of military service? To answer this question, it is important to understand how I approach my practice as an artist. Over the past 25,000+ years, ceramic materials have been used to produce anything from common cups and bowls to highly decorative architectural tile. Ceramic technology has been an accompaniment throughout history to human development. My interest springs from this and lies primarily in understanding and testing the potential of handmade objects to be part of engagement and “social practice” approaches to art production. I am intrigued by the ubiquitous nature of “the cup”—that something so common is a perfect entry point into people’s lives. My work uses this usefulness not as a way to create an esthetic experience, but rather to be a catalyst for conversation or understanding.

My approach with this project is to understand the possibility of objects and making within the context of the other collaborators. It was clear from the outset that I needed to engage fellow ceramic artist Joshua Zeis, who is a combat veteran who served as a medic on a bomb clearing team in Iraq. About five years ago, Josh was a student at NDSU where I teach ceramics. It was during this time that Josh accompanied me, along with six other ceramic students, to Red Lodge Clay Center to engage the community with a series of craft-based projects. The experience of working with Josh, along with his own recent development in his studio practice, led to my confidence that Josh was the perfect artist to include in Project Unpack.

We devised was two distinctly different projects for the “Craft/Art” portion of the project. The first project, a performance piece, was imagined by Josh; the Project Unpack team and I helped him execute and perform the work. The second project, Heirlooms, comes from a series of ceramics-based projects I have conducted in the past.

Josh’s performance piece is titled Return; it is a work that reflects on his service in the military. Josh sculpted a military rucksack in crystal clear ice, and then proceeded to walk a route in Fargo that echoed the route he drove on the day he learned he was being deployed to combat duty in Iraq. Return is a walking meditation about what it was like on the day Josh learned he would leave the relative safety and comfort of the Midwest to be dropped into a combat zone. By design, as he walked the 20+ miles on an 85-degree day in June, the backpack melted away. Moreover, during the walk, Josh broke small chunks of ice from the pack to nourish and replenish his body. This endurance piece is a powerful visual and conceptual statement about service, and reentry into civilian life.

As Josh walked, he found himself considering dangerous situations he encountered while deployed, including the experience of walking the rural roads of Iraq to check for roadside bombs. He recounts how this way of looking at the world is now a permanent part of him—one glint of metal on the roadside can elicit an immediate flashback to war. His performance piece captures the image of a combat veteran with a beautifully articulated backpack carved in crystal clear ice—walking until the backpack melts away—shedding the burden of weight and memories connected to his service.

The second project involving art and craft is the “heirloom cup” initiative. I craft ceramic cups on a pottery wheel and keep them in a pliable state. We then meet with veterans and family members from the Fargo/Moorhead community to transform these objects into family heirlooms. To accomplish this, we ask participants to consider objects that are symbolic of their or their family members’ service. We then talk through their experiences of military service and how it relates to the object that they brought in. Finally, we work with each participant to use their objects to transform the pliable cups into their own creations. It is important to understand that clay, in a pliable but firm state, perfectly picks up any texture through pressure. With this in mind, participants are free to “decorate” these cups. We premake the objects because we want to focus on conversation, rather than on teaching others how to construct. This works out perfectly because when the cups are completed there is a strong sense of ownership among participants.

The design of this project is purposefully simple and allows for variation based on what people bring to the session. During the first iteration of this project, participants brought objects from Bronze Star medals to tokens obtained through Alcoholic Anonymous signifying years of recovery from addiction. Veterans and family members are often eager to share stories of their past while creating their cups.

After the participation portion of the project, cups are fired to completion at NDSU. We house the cups in wooden boxes of our own design. These boxes feature laser cuttings on the interior box lids with abbreviated accounts of the history of the object used to transform the cup. The boxes serve a dual purpose—they can be featured in exhibition spaces by fixing them to a wall with the lid open, revealing the story, and they can then be returned to the Veterans and/or their family members as a family heirloom to pass down to future generations.

We connected with many veterans during this facet of the project and found that we were most fruitful when we formed specific partnerships with organizations such as assisted living homes. We held workshops onsite, which resulted in active and heartfelt interactions with dozens of participants. After the cups were transformed, my collaborators from Project Unpack, sociologist, Christina Weber, and English professor, Alison Graham Bertolini, spoke with the veteran cup-makers, recorded their stories, and turned them into oral histories for the archival portion of the wider project. The participants uniformly stated their satisfaction with the creative interactions and the follow-up interviews, while we (the Project Unpack team) found inspiration and a perfect opportunity to extend the conversations into other media formats.

Two stories from our cup workshops are of particular note: First, a woman came to a workshop with a dental mouth guard. She revealed that her two brothers had been deployed at the same time to serve in Iraq. The dental guard was symbolic of her anxiety following her brothers’ deployment, which caused her to clench her jaw, grind her teeth, and experience severe jaw pain. This condition is apparently common for those dealing with the stress of a war that is both distant, but also present, because of daily interactions on social media and relatively effortless communication between those on the home front and those deployed. This woman transformed her cup with bite marks produced by the guard. This is an example of how leaving a project open enough for people to be creative allows profound stories to be shared and communicated. Public Historian Angela Smith was able to follow up with this family member to record her oral history.

A second notable story came from a Vietnam veteran who came to the workshop with an Alcoholics Anonymous token for 25 years of sobriety. As he told the story of his service, he gently impressed the coin into the side of the cup, transforming it into a reminder of his combat experience and the resilience of the human spirit to overcome hardship. In talking to this individual, it became clear that this cup would now nourish his body with positive energy and healthy drink.

These two examples are just a small part of a series of cups that complement the variety of ways that our own fields have provided alternative ways of sharing stories and collecting information. As artists, it may not always be about what we make; but rather, how we think and how objects can be linked to memory to become artifacts that record and express military service and history.

Christina

The collaborative work we have done has had an impact on the way I think about data and data analysis. As a qualitative researcher, much of my work integrates different data sources and I model my research on the concept of bricolage. Norman Denzin (2010) explains that “As bricoleurs, they use multiple research strategies, from case study, to ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, biographical, historical, participatory, and clinical inquiry” (p. 15). Project Unpack has helped me further extend my work with bricolage through collaboration with colleagues in several disciplines. As Kincheloe (2005) explains, “the bricolage can be described as the process of getting down to the nuts and bolts of multidisciplinary research” (p. 323). As he goes on to explain,

Although this inter-disciplinary feature is central to any notion of the bricolage, I propose that qualitative researchers go beyond this dynamic. Pushing to a new conceptual terrain, such an eclectic process raises numerous issues that researchers must deal with to maintain theoretical coherence and epistemological innovation. (p. 324)

In many ways, I feel our work has enabled me to tap unique approaches to research and integrate those into my own research.

For example, working with colleagues from the humanities and arts inspired me to develop a greater appreciation for the role of material objects in my research. In particular, it helped me see the way objects shape and direct how people tell their stories and their ability to access their painful or traumatic memories. Although I have used photographs and other objects at different times in my research, this project has provided new ways for me think about the synergy between verbal and visual storytelling.

In terms of data analysis, the collaborative work led me to new insights regarding how to process and integrate objects. Working with colleagues who focus on design and think deeply about how to tell a story visually through an exhibition or a website has helped me think about how the presentation of data requires an artful eye, particularly when trying to tell the story of how individual experiences reflect a broader social phenomenon. Perhaps this is not new to work already done (Leavy, 2015), but I think the focus on outreach and how to present data in a meaningful way to the community has become an important focus as I move forward in my own work. Although I have not held a traditional view of data and interpretation, working with colleagues in other fields provided me the courage to embrace the ways in which social science research can tell stories in innovative ways that can reach different communities beyond academia.

Alison

I have grown significantly as the result of this collaboration. For me, the key to our effective working relationships is solid interpersonal communication. At our first group meeting we outlined a shared purpose and vision for what we hoped to achieve, by talking through our ideas regarding each team member’s responsibilities and goals and discussing how each of us might support other team members in their pursuits.

Importantly, Dr. Weber took a leadership role in the project by scheduling monthly meetings and checking in with all of us via email, telephone, and text before important events. She thus led the way in establishing open lines of communication between team members and by encouraging us all to have a voice in the design of the program.

Drs. Weber, Strand, and Smith impressed me with their fearless embrasure of difficult conversations. They willingly spoke about the difficulties of engaging veterans in emotional conversations and tasks. Dr. Weber shared her own personal stories of growing up with her troubled father, a Vietnam veteran himself. Dr. Strand took it upon himself to visit retirement communities in the area to make personal connections with the residents, while Dr. Smith led an interview-workshop that taught volunteers such as myself how to conduct an oral history interview with veterans speaking about their deployments and reintegrations into local communities.

Working with this wonderful team has inspired me to speak up, take an active role in interpersonal projects, and gain confidence in my own work. From our initial meeting on, we brought a diversity of ideas to the task of problem solving, which was extraordinarily helpful for overcoming small roadblocks such as scheduling and task assignments.

Michael

My practice has been at the intersection of art and social impact, but prior to our collaboration in Project Unpack, my work lacked fully integrated collaboration with scholars in other, complementary, areas. Working with a diverse population of individuals helped me to grow, both in my understanding of artistic agency, and in my understanding of the value and importance of my primary outside collaborator, artist Josh Zeis, who is a veteran. I especially valued Josh’s willingness to ask challenging questions based on his own experiences of war; such questions led me to recognize how artistic agency is expanded and broadened within a larger and more dynamic team of individuals in collaboration.

My artistic agency was also broadened significantly through exposure to the expertise of my collaborators. For example, the capturing of a narrative was enhanced and understood far more effectively in concert with my colleagues in public history and English. In addition, the examination of such information via the lens of a sociologist allowed me to see the value of information beyond the individual and into the collective nature of the work. By working directly with colleagues in public history, social science, and English, I gained invaluable perspective on how to design projects in the future.