The road behind and the journey ahead: Travels in epistemology

Abstract

This paper offers an account of my own epistemological journey over four decades of social work practice and research. It traces the journey from my early years as a practitioner working from an approach largely grounded in what we called practice wisdom, to my current situation as a professor of social work, undertaking research and guiding students on their own research and practice journeys.

The paper begins with a vignette from a research field trip in the early 2000s – mid point in my journey and then takes a more chronological turn exploring disability research and the theme of voice and activism in research. Finally, I offer some reflections on the journey itself, what has influenced and guided my own learning, the challenges and the insights.

Keywords

Disability epistemology quantitative research reflexivity voice

Introduction

In this paper, I offer an account of my own epistemological journey over four decades of social work practice and research. It has been an instructive exercise to reflect on my early years as a practitioner, when I did not know what epistemology was, let alone think about my own stance on it. My understanding back then of knowledge production – more likely conceptualised as knowing stuff– was largely grounded in what we called practice wisdom, drawn from reflecting on practice, observing and thinking about clients and their situations, the systems that engulfed and supported them and what interventions might be considered appropriate and effective. The knowledge of experienced others through professional supervision assisted this journey. Now, as a professor of social work, having guided many students on their own research and practice journeys, I hope it might offer some useful insights to others starting this journey.

The paper begins with a vignette from a research field trip in the early 2000s. This is of course somewhere in the middle of my four decades, I am not a great one for linear narratives. But the story still serves as a stark reminder that people come to know in different ways.

I then take up the chronology of my experiences doing disability research – experiences which highlight the interconnectedness of being and identity and ways of knowing. This section focuses on the way voice and activism in research played out. Finally I offer some reflections on the journey itself, what has influenced and guided my own learning, the challenges and those lightbulb moments when the clarity of meaning fell like a thousand stars into my lap.

Reflecting on rural fieldwork – talking not digging

We are driving in the outback. It is late in the day. I am driving while my friend and colleague, D, reflects on the interviews we have completed today. Darkness is falling and we are tired – desperate to get to the motel in the small town ahead. A shower, a meal and a bed. We have been driving and interviewing rural practitioners all day for a study-based around small communities in rural and remote Australia.

At last, the motel is ahead and we drive in to the reception area. I climb out of the university station wagon, dusty and dishevelled and not in the mood for too much talk. I am feeling talked out having listened to amazing people tell of their work, their dilemmas, their triumphs. Wonderful stories but exhausting. We are welcomed by the manager, a country bloke probably doing it tough and keen to have company: Where are youse girls from? he drawls. We tell him we are from the university and doing research in the area and will be staying for two nights. As middle-aged women we try not to think too much about being called girls at this stage of the day.

Research? He queries slowly walking around the car looking in through the windows with some degree of suspicion. In the back, sat two small suitcases, a computer bag (quite large by today’s standards) and a briefcase lay. What kind of research? Where’s all your equipment? You aren’t from the government are you?

We don’t have equipment we explain. We’re interested in talking to people and learn from their stories about what it is like working and living in the bush. We aren’t with the government.

Hah he retorts Funny kind of research if you ask me. Warming to his argument, he tells us that to really do research in these parts we need to be more scientific like the soil and crop guys. We gathered that of course he would be happy to talk to us if we wanted to know a thing or two about living in the bush.

D and I discuss this exchange at length later. D is a social scientist of note especially in feminist and rural sociology. I am the social worker always bringing in the practice angle. We are a good team. We even wrote a paper about friendship and qualitative research which we will explore later.

This happened over 15 years ago but it still resonates. For our man in the motel, one needed to measure stuff with equipment if one was to truly know and understand any phenomenon. He knew about research. Researchers in his part of the world were usually doing soil testing, geological assays or recording agricultural field trial data. For me and my colleague, it was the very conversations with people in his small rural community that contributed to knowledge for us. How people see their world, what are their challenges, how do they understand the very earth in their fields and what drought does not only to the earth and crops but to their families and communities. These kinds of questions are central to social work and arise regularly whether we do research, work as practitioners, take social action or all of these.

I reflect on this experience often. It serves as a useful reminder bringing me back to that central question of what makes qualitative research still so misunderstood in many quarters, not only in parts of the academy but also in the broader society. How ingrained are the preferences for the objective, scientific paradigms. How difficult is it for qualitative studies to be funded, to inform policy, to be adopted in practice. In her 2012 paper on the epistemological bootcamp, Karen Staller explains with edifying clarity this ‘epistemological unconsciousness’ and how she kept bumping into real world experiences of it – just like our motel man. We will return to this briefly later.

Voice

As a qualitative researcher, voice and voices have surrounded and saturated my thinking and action for many years. It still underpins much of my work and is especially pertinent for linking research, practice and activism. There is perhaps a distinction to be made here between voice and voices. People with disabilities want to be heard, not studied. They want their voice to be heard as individuals and they want their combined lived experiences, their voices, to have impact and drive change. They understand the power of knowledge and seek their knowledge to be legitimised. As we point out in a recent paper:

Making space for the voices of others is particularly important in the area of disability research, given that self-advocates with a disability have fought strenuously to assert their own voices and experiences for decades. (Sunderland et al., 2015)

Much of my career as a practitioner, teacher, researcher and activist has been in the disability sector. I fell into this work by accident – a serendipitous cup of coffee in my kitchen with an old friend (we had met as undergrad BSW students 20 years earlier). She was working on a major national disability project to transform institutional rehabilitation programs to community-based inclusive models. I was at home with three kids having stopped full time work for almost four years. It was tough but exciting and she needed someone to come on board as a locum. Just for a couple of months she said.

That was 30 years ago. I have worked alongside people with disability and their families in various roles and capacities ever since.

I began this work eagerly seeking out knowledge that could guide my practice. What were the causes, manifestations and interventions available for various kinds of disability? How did families cope with the news that their son or daughter was now paraplegic? Would my prior knowledge and experience working in community health translate to this new context? Knowledge production in disability was almost entirely derived from medical and scientific models. Disability policy and programs were linked to health and hospital systems which in the main provided institutional care and therapeutic interventions. People with disability were essentially seen as sick, broken and requiring interventions that would reinstate some degree of normalcy. The other driving model was one underpinned by assumptions and values of charity. With origins deep in Judeo-Christian traditions, this constructed people with disability as objects of pity, as victims of personal tragedy needing charitable intervention. They were among the ‘deserving poor’.

When I began working alongside people with disability and subsequently their families, it soon became very clear that they brought their own lived experience to the project. These were different knowledges, different ideas that were missing, perhaps even excluded, from the dominant discourses of policy and practice. Rather than regarding their situation of being disabled as tragic or broken, people with disability, and their families in many cases, spoke of hopes, of dreams and abilities. They also told stories of oppression, of exclusion and barriers created by the environments in which they lived. This presented some crucial questions and dilemmas. If I was to seriously engage in disability social work practice, and be true to those I was working alongside, it was clear I had work to do.

Two key issues presented themselves. First, I realised that I needed to seek further knowledge about the lived experiences of people with disability and I needed to do this in a purposeful and rigorous manner. There was a lack of fit between what I had learned from health and medical sciences about disability and what the people with disability were sharing about their lived experiences. Second, the key motivation here was becoming part of a movement for social change. I needed a praxis for knowledge building that was rigorous yet based firmly on a commitment to generating and supporting social and political change.

So what to do? I was now working full time. I had a growing family and a busy life. Why embark on an even busier one?

I went back to university. Surely here I would find the answers and so began my research journey through a research Master’s degree and later a PhD. Obviously it was not a fast or straightforward trip! And it isn’t over yet.

It was through qualitative research methodologies and engagement with theory that I started to build rudimentary frameworks to make sense of the dilemmas and challenges of my practice. Some key influences at this time included: feminist qualitative methodologies especially Reinharz’s notion of standpoint; Foucault’s work on power and the importance of listening to marginalised and subjugated knowledges – raising those voices from below; and the wealth of theory emerging at that time from interdisciplinary disability studies.

My first foray into qualitative research was through my Masters thesis – a study of the hopes and expectations of parents of children with disability. The topic came from my experiences in practice, the troubling disjuncture between what was the accepted knowledge of parenting a disabled child (grief, stress, depression) and the glimpses of more hopeful insights some of the families shared in our discussions (struggles, dreams, a wish for good life). A small sample using in depth interviews, listening and reflecting with them revealed fresh understandings into a hitherto little researched topic. The research process began tentatively. I was committed to honouring the voices of the parents, to learn from the subjugated knowledges they held. I held on to the notion that this was research with not on the participants. But there was resistance, resistance I had not predicted and was, therefore, unprepared for. The academy had constraints, strongly advising student research to conform to a safe approach – do not rock the boat, better to use a simple survey design, a more orthodox methodology, keep it simple. I persevered with this commitment to inclusive research. I fell on my face a few times but got back up again. Overall it was a compromise. I did not achieve what I thought I could in terms of honouring the parents’ voices. But I learned a lot and I was awarded the degree. New knowledge, albeit small, about parents’ hopes and expectations had been generated from this process of research that stirred my curiosity. There were other ways of knowing out there and in places often not explored.

It was at this point I decided that I wanted to be an academic. Research had grabbed me and, if I wanted to be part of the academy, I had to get a PhD. That research was about the closure of institutions and I got deep into a messy relationship between research, policy and activism.

As a researcher, I was grappling with the issue of whether this activism, deliberately and transparently grounded in a rights movement and underpinned by a practice framework informed by critical theory perspectives, could be legitimised in my research. Did I lose perspective? Become less objective? Could research as practice as activism be realised in a way that was trustworthy, ethical and rigorous?

This was a struggle – a kind of bifurcation of identities which I kept trying to bridge or bring together. Lather (1986) in her pursuit of a research praxis, described the issues of validity in openly ideological research. Her descriptions really resonated with me early. I think this is much smoother now. We have more theory, more methodologies and methods available that foster and nurture the links with practice. Here I am thinking of the development of narrative in research and in social work practice interventions; of participatory action research also used in community work and social development for example.

The notion of voice and voices kept arising. We needed to hear them. We needed to listen to what people excluded from the important conversations those voices from below, had to say. Other influences came from beyond the academy. I was heavily engaged with activism for disability rights, lobbying policymakers, mobilising stakeholders, joining campaigns around specific disability issues, and attending street marches. It seemed to me that it was the finding and raising of voices that was key to effecting real change.

The theme of voice and voices culminated when I embarked on a totally exciting project called 1000 voices. It proved to be one of the biggest challenges in my research career.

1000 voices

Several years ago I met with N, a newly appointed, bright early career researcher. Fresh from a PhD in bioethics, she had no qualms about posing provocative questions. Over coffee one day, she asked me if I had unlimited funding and capacity and no barriers what big dream research project would I like to do. Anything at all? I asked. Anything you like, she replied. Well I have to confess I dove into the discussion with gusto. An hour later, I had set out my dream of a large on line collection of narratives, authored by people with disability on whatever topic they wished using whatever modality they preferred.

Me: If we find the stories and voices of a few so empowering and impactful, what would 1000 be like?

N: OK Let’s go for it!

We have written about this project elsewhere (Matthews et al., 2013; Sunderland et al., 2015) but several lessons pertinent to this paper are worth documenting. First, however, a short summary of the project is needed to give some context.

1000 voices is an international web-based platform for gathering and displaying stories about the lived experience of people with disabilities (www.1000voices.edu.au). From an initial dream about the potential power of many voices, the project has grown to include life stories told by people with a disability that are presented in multiple media and formats, including text, audio, video, graphics and visual art. We believed that the power of qualitative data on a global scale needed to be explored and advanced. We drew on the growing literature and research around life story and narrative work in disability and set up the website to be an accessible and searchable database.

We initially envisioned the project would facilitate participant generated qualitative data that might be accessed for a wide range of research projects. However, the potential for research, awareness raising and education has attracted participants, advocates, policymakers and educators as well as researchers.

The specific objectives for the project initially were the following:

To establish an international human network of researchers, advocates, families and service providers.

To establish an online infrastructure where people with disabilities and their families from around the world can upload their stories via multiple media.

To create an extensive qualitative database of original life story data that is easily accessible for research purposes.

To conduct advanced large-scale qualitative research on a range of topics on the lived experiences of disability around the world.

To make life stories available to people with disabilities, their families and communities in multiple languages and formats.

To foster knowledge-building networks across individuals, communities, policy makers and service systems based on research findings from life stories of people with disabilities and their families.

It was always the aim that people should tell their own story rather than have the narrative filtered or directed via another person. It was for this primary reason that we opted to use multiple media or modalities for telling of stories. This was perhaps ambitious but our experience in this aspect of the project was an ongoing dilemma, innovation and challenge.

The project raised a number of interesting issues for narrative and other forms of research in the area of disability. Chief among these – perhaps not surprisingly – were issues of voice, ethics, power, control and representation for people with disabilities and their allies.

People with higher support needs often needed support to tell their story. This meant the definition of narrative needed to be expanded. How authentic is a story when it is related via another person? Yet for people who do not use verbal language the options are quite limited – do you have a ‘filtered’ story or none at all? Often it was the parents or close family members of a person with high support needs, advocating for their family member’s story/ voice to be heard. Again, the tension of compromise arose. We opted to honour filtered stories rather than no story at all.

A second issue in authenticity was the potential pressures on authors to cast their story in a certain light. It is acknowledged that many people with disability present stories to services in order to gain support hence these maximise impairment and negative impacts. The good story – i.e. positive experiences can be problematic for influencing policy makers and service providers. For example many social work assessments start with the impairment narrative – what are the deficits? Some potential authors indicated that they had ‘no story’ worth telling and expressed the view that their lives had been very ordinary. The challenge was to demonstrate the ‘extraordinariness of the ordinary’ and the need for a wide range of stories – every one different.

While technical issues have featured in the project’s development – for example the real difficulty of technically supporting multimodal reflective narrative over time – they are important only to the degree that they have enabled participants to share their stories in as ‘free’ and ‘unfettered’ a way as possible.

Further nuanced understandings of the role of narrative in disability also emerged. These centred on newly highlighted understandings of how narrative enables people to describe the things that are most intimate and important to them in their own way. 1000 Voices produced a collection of stories that depict a rich and diverse past, present, and future for the storytellers themselves, and our wider society.

The dynamic nature of stories via 1000 Voices (e.g. people returning time and again over several months or years to add to their stories) also reaffirmed the reflective and dynamic nature of narrative in people’s lives and the potential role of research projects in supporting narrative-based communities. In returning to update their stories, and adding to ongoing development of the project – through for example giving feedback on the site and contributing to public presentations – participants moved from being ‘one-off’ contributors of ‘data’ toward a longer term presence as a collaborator in the project.

The potential transformative power of projects such as 1000 Voices has been particularly pertinent in ongoing explorations of how the stories collected via 1000 Voices might be used in contexts such as policy making. The richness, breadth and depth of topics covered by storytellers indicate great potential for storytelling that is as ‘unfettered’ as is technically possible via online platforms. The lingering and perhaps more difficult questions include: how might these creative, dynamic, and rich accounts of lived experience inform decision making on policies that will in turn shape the lived experiences of people with disabilities into the future? What can we do to ensure that these stories are listened to in ways that respect and comprehend storytellers’ experiences? How can large collections of disability life stories be used to promote socially just transformative change in society more generally?

…. As researchers engaged in a long-term project that aims to amplify the voices of people with disability, we have grappled with the above considerations at the theoretical, methodological and practical levels. (Sunderland et al., 2015: 49)

On one hand, ethical issues inevitably arose, some expected and others pushing me to wrestle even more deeply. There were particular concerns regarding informed consent of those participating. Sharing personal accounts online might have afforded greater choice as to whether and what they disclosed online without the influence of face to face interaction with the researchers. This could be helpful in avoiding what Hallahan (2009) described as the common practice in which people with a disability are ‘coaxed’ into telling stories of suffering and blame by researchers and policymakers. On the other hand, participation in the project assumed a certain level of competency, in that participants had to understand the nature of consent independently and to acknowledge the implications of having their story on the Internet. This excluded many people deemed to lack capacity to make informed decisions.

1000 voices, therefore, was a steep and bumpy learning adventure. It challenged and strengthened me and contributed a great deal to my reflections on research and my own journey in knowing.

The epistemological journey – some key considerations

The following and final section of this paper draws together just a few of the major influences that shaped my thinking and my work. Writing this paper has been challenging – perhaps more so than I had originally anticipated – but it has also been a welcome interlude. The following points do not cover every influence and they are not in any particular order of importance. I have found them instructive, sometimes affirming and sometimes worrying. But they continue to bubble up to demand attention, to be affirmed or tested.

Reflective practice/reflexivity

Social workers are trained in reflective practice from the very beginning of their studies. It is a powerful tool for learning from and by experience. The process or procedural aspects of reflective practice need to be purposeful with some structure but our learning from it is not formal knowledge transfer as in other forms of teaching and learning. I have always found that reflection yields insights into what happened, or what might have been missed. The step up to reflexivity includes strategies to question my own attitudes, values and assumptions including prejudices and unconscious abuse of power. This involves deep examination of identities as Chunn and Menzies (2014) so cogently put it:

… reflexivity is a central component of feminist and other critical social research because it forces us to consider our own sociopolitical and moral identities, which invariably affect the generation of our research interests and questions and thus the methods we use, as well as the production of knowledge.

One risk in reflexive practice to be noted is what Bourdieu (2004: 89) calls ‘narcissistic reflexivity’ where we can become too complacent, indulgently looking back at ourselves. Practising an ongoing and conscious critique in reflexive practice has been key for my work. Too easily I (still!) can assume my emancipatory intent will lead to an emancipatory outcome only to find that that progression is not always as expected as we found in the 1000 voices experience.

Searching for coherency in a messy journey

Patti Lather was helpful early on in my research journey. I confess I was initially drawn to her work simply reading the titles of her articles and books. Words and phrases that really spoke to my experience – ‘getting lost’, ‘this side of messy’, ‘troubling clarity’, ‘a less comfortable social science’ and my favourite ‘the praxis of stuck places’. I felt that Lather gave me permission to feel stuck and/or lost but more importantly she and others provided coherent links across theory, ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies. This is amongst the biggest struggles in qualitative research especially for those early in the process.

The strive for coherency was also assisted through consulting and adopting the work of Michael Crotty (2003) who set out frameworks for unpacking the foundations of qualitative research – ontology, epistemology, methodology and methods. I have used his text with students for many years. Of course many other scholars have provided similarly useful frameworks that offer us the broader epistemology/methodology/theory links as well as practical suggestions as to how to sort it out. I always, therefore, suggest that several are consulted despite the confusion re terminology that inevitably arises.

Learning from and with others

Reflecting on the people with disability and families that have influenced how I understand knowledge production and ways of knowing, has certainly been a profound and longstanding guiding companion. It is through the myriad of conversations, debates, joint projects, social action campaigns that I have learned from so many others for many years now. It was from these relationships that I have come to realise the importance of and capacity to carry out inclusive research. Here too, I have come face to face with the nature of power and power differentials in the relationship between researcher and the participant. We are well aware, as qualitative researchers, of our privileged position as researchers for example having access to resources not available to our participants who are often marginalised and vulnerable. We have to be aware of power and how it can influence the research process. This includes understanding that participants cannot be assumed to be powerless or lacking in agency. I do not think the power issue can ever be assumed as resolved. The relationships between all of us in the research process have to be constantly negotiated and reflected upon. We are all jointly engaged in the furthering of knowledge.

Over several years, ‘learning from’ transformed into ‘learning with’, and this is now a key principle for knowledge production in all my work. Perhaps the most profound realisation of this has been through my postgraduate research students. I have learned with all of my students, a good number of whom have been people with lived experience of disability. Some of them were unable to gain a place in a PhD program because of their disability. Some required modified schedules, alternative formats and different ways of ‘doing research’ but we learned together along the way.

There are also many scholars – too numerous to cover here – that have shaped me in powerful ways. I have focussed specifically throughout this paper on just a few. Those whose work brought a disability lens were particularly illuminating. Much of Rosemary Garland Thompson’s work has been extremely helpful in understanding how lived experience of disability offers epistemological resources to research and practice. Her work in interdisciplinary disability studies brings a range of understandings in feminism, critical disability studies, epistemology and ethics. She explains how the experience of disability offers us many resources, for example, narrative resources give us different ways of story-telling, epistemic resources, new ways of knowing through the body itself and ethical resources new ways of thinking about what is a good flourishing life. She also advocates for the importance of having a public voice in this work. Critical disability studies have been crucial in shaping my thinking and research and this has aided the bridge between research and advocacy.

Finally, we return to the opening vignette – our man in the motel in country Australia. The other influence in that story was of course, D my colleague and friend. We have worked together for more than 20 years now and still reflect on the development of our research praxis. As we recalled in an article reflecting on collaboration and friendship in research, we were seeking a ‘new form of research ‘praxis’ – the seamless integration of methodology/discipline/ friendship’ (Stehlik & Chenoweth, 2005: 41).

This praxis began during our first collaboration and developed over time through many joint projects, including several that took us to regional, rural and remote Australia. We acknowledged then the importance of subjectivity in all aspects of research and practice and the need for researchers to continually reflect on the ways in which we as researchers influence the situation. Drawing on Stanley and Wise (1990), we proposed that reflexivity had to focus on the relationship between the researcher(s) and the researched group, the recognition of emotion as a research experience, the intellectual autobiography of the researcher(s), the management of different realities or perspectives or meanings of the researcher(s) and the researched group and the question of power in research and writing. And we added another: the relationship between the researchers themselves. In our case, we have found that this approach yields results as we wrote more than 10 years ago:

It gives a richness and depth to the experience, not only to those involved, but to both of us as active in the process. It expands the potential of the process of evaluation research beyond its utilitarian nature, and allows for the blossoming of our creative sides. … We continue to cherish the unique partnership and to enable innovative ways to maintain it into the future. (Stehlik & Chenoweth, 2005: 48).

Conclusion

In this paper, I have tried to give an honest account of my epistemological journey, albeit a very abridged version. It has included purposeful reflection, devotion to reading and thinking, working alongside others as well as some serendipitous events which sparked break throughs as well as despair. It also spans a long period of time. I think it is important to remember that gaining experience takes time and for some experiences, it is years in the making. As I share with my students and other early career researchers, if someone had said to me at forty that this is where I would be in my mid-60s, I would have thought they were crazy. But the learning hasn’t stopped, and there is still much work to be done.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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