Intimate Inquiry

Knowing Love

When qualitative researchers study people who we love, it means we test methodological boundaries, flip the script on method and technique, we fundamentally challenge what counts as data. In fact, love is a kind of data. It makes sense, given our tendency to think of data as bits of “good information” (Creswell, 2013, p. 146) gathered and manipulated to address our musings on the social world. In research, love—an exercise of will for the satisfaction of human needs (hooks, 2001,2002)—is telling, and it can be good. It is good if it is neither romantic nor mystical, neither happenstance nor something we feel, but rather a choice, something we do. It is good if it enhances, protects, and alters another’s life. It is good if it is personally empowering, humanizing, and unabashedly interventionist. It is good if it is messy and moving—necessarily so—because it “emerges out of [the] muddy, unmediated relatedness” of affect (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 4). It can also be good for its own sake, especially if it is motivated by commitments to loyalty and sustained bonds over careers and making money. Most of all, I believe the act of love is good if it is accounted for in our scholarship, shown, made transparent for readers to evaluate its role in the nature of our work (see also Darder, 2002). Naturally, many academics are not open to discussing love and its place in social science, having been “professionally socialized into excising [it] from our scholarly writing” (Dominguez, 2000, p. 365). However, Paulo Freire, for example, sees love as an expression of our humanity and for him teaching is always an act of love. Furthermore, Freire argues that love is based on commitment and willingness to struggle persistently, and labor of love is critical for our dismantling the oppressor–oppressed dichotomy (Darder, 2002). In this article I know that love is a radical take on data because I spent 3 tumultuous years trying to write/right my teenaged brother’s wrong.

Reading my dissertation, Bad Boy: My Baby Brother and the Social Ecology of Difference (2011), still gives me a palpable sense and a vivid memory of the personal crisis that set it in motion. I begin briskly with a candid narrative. By the third paragraph, I reveal that my grandparents have died, my parents are in therapy, and I practically live back home with my family as we reel ourselves in from the precipice of insanity. No throat clearing or academic posturing—just me describing the sheer force of the moment when, atop of all this, my brother, Chris, publicly announced his plans to drop out of high school.

He was 15, full of heart with wit beyond his years, and clueless about what it might mean to be an undereducated young Black male these days: unemployment, underemployment, earning less whenever he does get a job than those with a diploma, incarceration. When I got wind of things, all of my identities—a doctoral student, a teacher, and his big sister—bore in on a frenetic attempt to understand how he’d come to that point, why leaving made sense to him, what was happening in that moment, and where the places of conflict and opportunity might have been. I desperately wanted to learn more in order to do more, to step in, to change the course of Chris’ life in some educational way. At 24, I delved as close to my brother as he’d allow, asked the simplest questions, paid scrupulous attention to what he and others in the family thought was going on, and documented the ebb and flow of the moment. It all seemed so instinctive to me back then. And now, with the clarity of hindsight and the benefit of feminist lenses, I understand that my fieldwork-turned-dissertation was born in the heat of a furnace, thrust into the world on the basis of conviction, and expressed through dogged acts of love.

Showing Love

Brant (1994) reminds us that, “Who we are is written on our bodies, our hearts, our souls,” and that in each of us there is a desire to be known and felt (p. 74). To be acknowledged and validated, and to have our histories confirmed—to be witnessed for “what has been and what is to be” (p. 74). Witnessing involves the deliberate attendance to people, seeing and taking notice of that which they believe is meaningful. Fears and desires are situated in a sense of past and future, and experiences become the fabric of time and space. To witness is to validate the existence of stories, and to protect their places in the world. Ropers-Huilman (1999) writes: “We are acting as witnesses when we participate in knowing and learning about others, engage within constructions of truth, and communicate what we have experienced to others” (p. 23). For Ropers-Huilman, witnessing is qualitatively different from observing people as a research strategy. When we witness others’ lives, we are complicit in active and partial meaning-making about those experiences, up close and personal to the phenomenon of collective interest. While it is impossible to really know other people or completely understand what is happening to them, the act of witnessing is an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn about lived lives, and to explore rationalizations of people’s experiences.

There is a particular urgency for the act of witnessing within the context of marginalization or wrongdoing. Being a spectator of calamities taking place both near and afar is a quintessential part of the modern experience. I think of the recurring theme in slave narratives and the writings of holocaust survivors who describe the trauma of public indifference to their struggles—the persistent feeling of invisibility and being made mute—as equally egregious assaults. At a minimum, bearing witness to the pain of significant others is the act of validating and advancing their fundamental rights to peace, justice, and humanity.

We do this by watching closely in the particular contexts in which our people try to make sense of things. We listen intently and provide a captive audience for critical reflections on the tough questions of guilt and responsibility. Laub (1992) warns, “the absence of an empathic listener, or more radically the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish . . . and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story” (p. 68). For Laub and for me as well, the act of listening is vital to the production and co-ownership of people’s truths. But it is also the obligation of engaging the conversation that is central to the process of intimate inquiry.

Engaging points us to the posing of problems and the highlighting of contradictions that are inherent to all experiences of the peopled world. To engage is to put people in deliberate dialogue around the mundane, the taken-for-granted, the whispered, and the hushed. When we engage, we publicly name what we have witnessed and draw upon multiple vantage points—including the lenses of the inquirer herself—for a fuller and more complicated understanding of people’s issues. Through engaging, we aim to establish the conditions for personal empowerment. Lather (1991) reminds us that this means we create the space for “analyzing ideas about the causes of powerlessness, recognizing systemic oppressive forces, and acting both individually and collectively to change the conditions of our lives (p. 4). Of course, providing the opportunity for people to speak for themselves and with others may not in fact lead them to do so, but there is an obligation, in a Levinasian (1998) sense, on the part of any researcher who witnesses and engages loved ones’ lives to take some course of action.

Writing as testimony—an incomplete account of events—is a considerable part of carrying out this task. The narrative becomes a vehicle through which we come to know other people and ourselves by implication; it reflects not merely a distant other but the social relations in our own environment. The love-based ambition for writing lives is a certain kind of reception that involves empathy and responsibility to think differently about the world, what Boler (1999) refers to as “testimonial reading.” Constructing a text that might nudge this sort of intentionality and introspection is a labor of love. Laboring encompasses the mental work of writing, but also the physical labor—the work of the hands and the bodies—of sharing available resources.

Lessons in Love

To my brother, I gave what I could—hugs, free food, rides, advice, sustained attention, and a detailed record of his lived experiences—which, in retrospect, offers plenty of “good information.” You could say that the dissertation is about what it is like for a teenager to live along the margins. You could say it is about growing up and navigating a labyrinth of social and academic worlds along the way. I pitched the article to my dissertation committee as an ethnography of a young man squeezed between the tensions of education and schooling, teaching and learning. There is certainly a case to be made that the dissertation is an ongoing tale about family, particularly the tendency to cull together and sometimes collapse under rapid fire. But it is also about the sister and scholar that I am, about the mesh of emotions and feelings that formed the rich context within which my love act was grounded and provoked, about methodology, method, and questions of evidence, about the ethical dilemmas that arise in intimate inquiries. Of all that the “data” communicates, Chris’ natural history is by far the most enduring and profound. I had lived with Chris for most of his life, and yet I did not know much of what my work uncovered about him. I discovered, for example, that Chris was a boy of 5 or 6 when he remembers hearing people call him “different”; at 10, he was a “problem child”; at 15 he was “disabled”; and beyond that point, “dropout” seemed to him to be a sensible marker. Even in his youth Chris understood the toxicity of talk.

Chris was aware of, and at times, complicit in racialized narratives of “bad black boys” surrounding young people like him, and I wrote about this too. As Dominguez (2000) notes, “Loving does not mean (a) presenting only positive characteristics of people in our writing; (b) eliding conflict, violence, or debate; or (c) feeling so guilty about our own geopolitically defined position that we treat those we consult with kid gloves, both in ‘the field’ (i.e., when we are spending time with them), and in our published writings” (p. 366). Not all data is sweetness and light.

Taking love seriously in social research means that the process and product of scholarship has real consequences for the lives of three-dimensional human beings, the researcher him- or herself included, not for imagined “others” somewhere out there. Love acts are driven by the notion that every human being deserves to live fully and freely in the world, and that each of us is an expert on the qualities of our own experiences. Each individual is perceptive and insightful, malleable, twisted and formed by one’s connections to everyone else on the planet. Qualitative researchers who invoke love in their work choose to witness, engage, and labor for the people who we admire and respect, and we treat them with the regard and reverence that we would extend to our own kin. Not “the subjects,” but “my people” inspire and direct such acts toward the negotiation of relationships—personal, social, political, historical—out of love and in solidarity. This kind of work demands an opening up and demystifying of the research process, nudges a broadened view of what qualifies as authentic and valuable knowledge, and begs questions of integrity and responsibility—like what do we do with all of our “good information?”

My “data” has been archived—at home, on the web, during conference presentations, and in essays like this one—existing as a repository, “a construction of collective memory,” and complex record of activity (Halberstam, 2005, p. 170). The way I see it, love ought to be recorded as evidence of work for change and, with permission, spread like wildfire. Beyond this, I imagine that love will one day be added to the compendium of approaches most often utilized in qualitative research. Alongside observations, interviews, documents, and audiovisual materials, there should be acts, to be propped up by a long tradition of participatory research (Lewis, 2006; Park, 2006) and measured against a “love-based criterion of value” (Dominguez, 2000, p. 365).