See Kate Derickson's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Masters of the universe and Situated solidarities and the practice of scholar-activism

This paper accompanies "Situated solidarities and the practice of scholar-activism," an article I co-authored with Paul Routledge that appears in volume 33, issue 3 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. It is the second in a series of two papers that we authored based on our ongoing conversations about the practice of scholar activism (see also Derickson and Routledge, 2015). While the piece in Society and Space centers on Paul’s work with the Krishok Federation in Bangladesh, the conceptual framework is informed in part from work I’ve done in post-Katrina Mississippi, Atlanta, GA, Glasgow, Scotland and most recently the Gullah/Geechee Nation in the Southeastern US. When we were invited to contribute a post to accompany the article, I was in the midst of fieldwork in Gullah/Geechee Nation, working closely with Queen Quet, the Chieftess and Head of State for the Gullah/Geechee Nation and in collaboration with Annette Watson, Associate Professor at College of Charleston. Annette was on sabbatical at the time in Alaska working with indigenous communities that she had long partnered with there. The invitation to write this post provided an opportunity to think through and write about these dynamics as they unfolded, and I found that some more basic questions came to the fore for me and my collaborators when we were in the midst of things. In a conversation that unfolded via email (since the three of us are rarely in the same time zone), we explored some of the tensions that arise in our collaboration and asked ourselves and each other why we continue to pursue these kinds of collaborations between communities that have been historically marginalized and those of us based in and bound to institutions of higher education, freighted as those institutions are with legacies of colonialism, extraction, domination and white supremacy.

The Gullah/Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were brought to the US from the “Rice Coast” of Africa. Africans from that region were targeted by slave traders and valued by South Carolina plantation owners for their knowledge of rice cultivation. Because many whites were intolerant of the coastal lowland climate and environment, enslaved Africans on plantations in the region were often left alone to carry out the work of the plantation. Later, as they escaped or were freed, many gravitated to the Sea Islands, barrier islands along the South Carolina and Georgia coast, which remained relatively isolated until the mid-20th century, when mosquito control tactics, air conditioning, and bridges made for a more compelling environment for the region’s middle class and wealthy whites attracted to the beaches, natural beauty and natural resources of the region. The century of isolation allowed Black residents to retain many of the traditions they and their ancestors brought from Africa and produce new traditions. Studies have shown strong linguistic roots in Africa, as well as the retention of the most Africanisms among this culture than any other group in the US (Turner, 1949; Goodwine, 1998; Pollitzer, 1999; Campell, 2008; Cross, 2008). Until fairly recently, “unassimilated” Gullah/Geechees practiced subsistence livelihoods, feeding their families and making a little extra money by harvesting seafood from the creeks and oceans and farms. For many Gullah/Geechees, these activities remain a crucial component of their livelihoods.

Gullah/Geechee people have every reason to avoid being researched, and many of them do. Until relatively recently, it was common for Gullah/Geechee to be used as a derogatory term.  The Penn Center, a museum and cultural interpretive site that evolved from a Quaker-founded school for freedmen in the region avoided the term and encouraged its students to unlearn the Gullah language. Teachers in the public schools also ridiculed students for speaking Gullah. The rural subsistence livelihoods of Gullah/Geechees and their African customs and language seemed “backward” in the context of narratives like “racial progress,” and the obsession with modernization, industrialization and urbanization that characterized the middle of the 20th century. This perception led many Gullah/Geechees to become adept at “code switching” or presenting as “assimiliated” in environments that demanded it while speaking Gullah and practicing traditions and livelihood strategies on their family compounds. It also made many disassociate with the identity, language, culture and label “Gullah/Geechee.” For all of these reasons—and many more—research in Gullah/Geechee Nation is not a straightforward undertaking. As colleagues in positivist social sciences and health sciences have found, it can be nearly impossible to pin down a single definition of who is, and who is not, Gullah/Geechee. Many who consider themselves Gullah/Geechee choose to not share that identity publicly, or are skeptical of the motivations of white researchers who want to know about the lives and livelihoods. Moreover, the influx of tourists and vacations homeowners and the associated history of (and on going practices of) land dispossession by duplicitous and unscrupulous real estate agents and developers has created an air of suspicion and distrust of outsiders.

At the same time, the telos of cultural eradication looms large in outside narratives of the Gullah/Geechee people. Magazine articles and popular accounts of Gullah/Geechees nearly always casts them as a “relic” of a simpler time, a people whose ways are so out of sync with the contemporary condition that it is merely a matter of time before they are “wiped out.” This drive to “museumize” the culture, as Queen puts it, suits the tourism-based economy and the sunbelt developers, known to name their cul-de-sacs after Gullah/Geechee sweet grass basket designs after displacing basket stands with their development without a trace of irony. These dynamics create a dilemma for Gullah/Geechees: knowledge about their livelihoods, their land ownership, and their continued existence can make them more vulnerable, but so too can their absence from the historical record, misrepresentations of their current lives and livelihoods, and/or failure by those who make policy to appreciate the impact that changes will have on Gullah/Geechees. This dilemma puts Queen Quet in the role of both ambassador to academics who want to collaborate in good faith with Gullah/Geechees, and a gatekeeper of those very same people, many of whom can still cause harm, even with good intentions. “Without others having accurate knowledge of who my people are” she says, “there are no means by which they can assist us in our continued existence. In most cases, those with no information or misinformation about my people have actually participated in acts and decisions that have caused displacement, destruction, and disturbance to and of the culture.” So for her, non-engagement is not an option.

Queen Quet facilitating a focus group of Gullah/Geechees in Fernandina Beach, Florida in June 2015. The focus group was one of a series conducted throughout Gullah/Geechee Nation by Queen and Kate Derickson, building on previous work by Annette Watson exploring natural resource management and its impacts on Gullah/Geechee lives and livelihoods.

One strategy she has used to mitigate these impacts is to be closely involved in the wording and framing of research tools and scripts for engagement. “I have found,” she writes, “that insuring that the native community leaders asking the questions to the citizens in their community is a concrete technique of engagement that has been effective in a number of ways, especially in regard to ‘decolonizing research.’ These discussions allow the community’s voice(s) to be directly heard instead of the words of an ‘interpreter’ that may already have preconceived notions of a particular ‘research questions’ that they simply want to ‘confirm’ speaking on behalf of the ‘subjects’ of their study. This is a MAJOR misguided practice that has led to a series of published works misrepresenting the Gullah/Geechee culture, language, and traditions which has led to others mimicking what was written and referencing this misinformation in other works—both written and performed.”

For academics seeking to collaborate with the Gullah/Geechee people and other native or historically marginalized communities, Annette ranks humility as one of the most important tools, and points out this is not a characteristic academics are prone to cultivating. For her, this means sublimating the demands of the academy and academic timeframes and prioritizing the needs of the community. She writes: “In my work, I have largely avoided completing single-authored pieces as a way to ensure that I am not the only one driving the research agenda.” She considers non-academic publications and products to be some of the more valuable outputs, such as an atlas or community video. “Not much of that work counted in my tenure file, but academia has been changing over the last 20 years to allow critical scholars like us to work and think in the ways that we do and still be successful in academia,” she writes. “Academia is catching up to the world outside of the ivory tower, and more and more collaborative arrangements are considered ‘research’ after all. Decolonized research is possible.” 

Queen Quet shows focus group participants a woodcarving by Gullah artist Johnnie Simmons called 'The Game Warden' as part of a focus group exploring natural resource management in Gullah/Geechee Nation in June 2015 on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

Paul and I have elsewhere described our approach to collaborative scholar-activist knowledge production as one in which the research questions is triangulated between theoretical innovation, considerations of the political implications of knowing, and producing knowledge that communities with which we collaborate want to know. This approach has mostly served me well: I have had great success developing extremely generative relationships with communities wherever I have worked doing engaged research that I want to do with a tenure-track job at a major research university. I agree with Annette that decolonized research is possible. Yet, as I shared with Queen Quet during my most recent 6 weeks of field work in Gullah/Geechee Nation over the summer, finding a center in that triangle is not always comfortable or easy. Despite my own commitment to not allowing institutional imperatives to drive my collaborations, at times I felt a welling anxiety rooted in my social science training that I wasn’t getting a sufficiently representative “sample” of Gullah/Geechee responses because I was mostly meeting and interviewing people I connected with through Queen Quet. At times it felt as though the maintenance of a trusting and fruitful relationship with my research collaborator was in direct conflict with producing anything resembling “valid” research findings and results. I also had to weigh my desire to share these concerns with Queen against my own ethical commitment to not burden community-based collaborators with institutionally-driven challenges.

To address these seemingly conflicting priorities, I revisited my work with Paul in which we argue that a researcher has to carefully consider what is politically at stake in knowing the answers to our research questions and the consequences of our research activities. I was still struggling with some of these questions when I took a road trip with Queen Quet and some of the Gullah/Geechee Elders to do a site visit in North Carolina. During that car ride I raised some questions I anticipated getting from fellow academics when I presented my work. I anticipated, for example, questions about the percentage of the Gullah/Geechee diet that was filled through subsistence farming and fishing, and asked Queen and the Elders if they thought it would be useful for us to collect that kind of information. Queen was not interested. “I know how numbers get used against me” she said. Why, she challenged me, should they always be put in the position of proving they exist? Moreover, why should they even be the subject of study, when it is white people from outside who are changing the landscape?

I agree with Queen: the most pressing research in Gullah/Geechee Nation does not entail enumerating, measuring, counting, or “studying” Gullah/Geechee people’s lives and livelihoods. For Annette, this has meant a turn toward ethnography; it is through the ethnographic engagement that humility can be cultivated and more insight into what is really at stake in Gullah/Geechee Nation can be produced. For me, it has meant a move away from ethnography all together. I take Gullah/Geechee Nation as a standpoint from which to know and arrive at a new vantage point for understanding the intersections of the state, natural resource management and racialization. I arrive at that standpoint through listening to Gullah/Geechees describe their experiences and name their challenges and desires, but I attempt to leave these narratives in tact and take them as they are given to me to the degree possible. I don’t always succeed, and one way to check that is by showing my community based collaborators drafts of my written work, as I’ve done throughout this process. Nevertheless, for me, the community itself is not my object of analysis, it is the epistemological location from which I pivot toward that which I do unravel, poke, challenge, measure and render an object of study.

It is worth noting, however, that Annette and I understand “ethnography” differently. When I distance myself from the method, I am attempting to draw a distinction about what processes and dynamics I am turning over, investigating, pulling apart and evaluating, and trying to emphasize the degree to which I am not doing that in relation to Gullah/Geechees. I’m also trying to highlight the fact that while I do spend a fair amount of time working with Queen and Gullah/Geechee Elders, we are almost always together to advance the work in some form or another. My graduate training emphasized that this was not ethnography because it does not entail spending long periods of time with people in spaces beyond work and research spaces. But for Annette, my distinction is too fine. She writes:

“It is the written product that distinguishes the approach: writing that represents a people or culture, that is reflexive, that is in a narrative format...like your post. Most of the time when I write an ethnography that is "about" an emic perspective it is co-authored with a member of that culture, but not all of the time.”

Despite the approach to observation, it is the narration that makes research ethnography, she argues (see Watson and Till, 2010).

Queen Quet addresses a crowd at Mosquito Beach on James Island, South Carolina during a Gullah/Geechee Famlee Day event in July 2015. Mosquito Beach was a popular destination for Gullah/Geechees and other African Americans during Jim Crow and remains a site of significance in the Gullah/Geechee community.

When I proposed a collaboration to this post, the first question Queen posed to Annette and me was: “Why have you chosen to work in Gullah/Geechee Nation and not in the communities you were born and raised in?” It took me longer to answer this question than I would have guessed, but ultimately my response was related: I’m not researching the Gullah/Geechee as such, rather, the community and object of scrutiny is academia and its understandings of capitalism, racialization and the state. In the article Paul and I wrote that accompanies this post, we use the concept of “situated solidarities” originated by Richa Nagar and Susan Geiger as a guiding ethical posture for research praxis. Situated solidarities emphasize the relational nature of the structures we inhabit and must navigate.  While I think many geographers and scholars are increasingly thinking about the social world in relational terms, the dichotomy of researcher/object of research remains stubbornly persistent. Instead, influenced by people like Nagar and Geiger and Donna Haraway, I think it is critical that we recognize and problematize the degree to which the production of knowledge itself and all the associated activities are themselves bound up in relationships with the dynamics we seek to understand.  Haraway describes herself  as always already in the “non-optional company of – and accountable to” those relationships she seeks to understand.” We are always already in a non-option relationship to Gullah/Geechee Nation, and are always already accountable to it.

Annette had a similar response:

“Like Dr. Derickson, my “community” is that group of scholars I imagine is my audience, a group that assumes knowledge is universal, and that non-Western experiences are aberrations; thus my approach to research is to speak to them about what I’ve learned from the people with whom I’ve worked, and communicate what those communities wish to be represented in the academic discourse. What is advanced through my research is a recognition that non-Western logics are viable means to approach a more adaptive and sustainable environmental politics.”

Annette’s final question to me and Queen asked us what “responsibility in research” means. For Queen, an awareness of the implications of the research practice and findings is crucial for decolonial research. This is echoed by the move for “triangulation” that Paul and I call for in our previous article. In that piece we argue that scholars ought not only be concerned with asking and answering questions that are of interest to them and their field, but also to the communities that they work with.  Perhaps more importantly, scholars should consider the political implications of asking and knowing the answer to their research question. Throughout my career I have grappled with the question “what is at stake in how and what we know” and while I don’t have a universal answer or axiom for answering that question, I know that carefully considering in conversation with communities one seeks to work with is a necessary dimension of “responsible” research practice.

Haraway writes about “response-ability.” I read her as writing the word that way to highlight how the knowledge that we produce can make us better able to appreciate the way that we are always already bound up in the dynamics we seek to understand. We cannot get outside them, we cannot have innocent and objective relationships to them and we cannot be absolved of our complicity. For me, this is a difficult and necessary mantra as a white scholar studying race. I am and always will be conducting research in the context of systemic, historically rooted and materially consequential white supremacy. This little bit of knowledge can be paralyzing, but, as Haraway suggests, better understanding the complexity of the systems we inhabit makes us better able to respond to, and be responsible to that with which we are always already in a relationship. She writes:

It is no longer news that corporations, farms, clinics, labs, homes, sciences, technologies, and multispecies lives are entangled in multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial worlding, but the details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities. Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to a new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and movement too.  Each time I trace a tangle and add a few threads that first seemed whimsical but turned out to be essential to the fabric, I get a bit straighter that staying with the trouble of complex worlding is the name of the game of living and dying well together on terra… We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, but not in the same ways.  The differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives (313).

References

Campbell E (2008) Gullah Cultural Legacies. Gullah Heritage Consulting Services.

Cross W (2012) Gullah Culture in America. Winston-Salem NC: Blair.

Derickson K and Routledge P (2015) Resourcing scholar-activism: collaboration, transformation and the production of knowledge. The Professional Geographer 67(1): 1 – 7.

Goodwine QQM Gullah/Geechee: Africa’s Seeds in the Winds of the Diaspora – Frum Wi Soul Tuh De Soul: The cash crops of the Sea Islands – Cotton, Rice, and Indigo. St Helena Island, SC: Kinship Press.

Haraway D (2012) Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in multispecies response-ability. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40(1): 301 – 316.

Pollitzer W (1999) The Gullah People and their African Heritage. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Turner LD (2002) Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Watson A and Till K (2010) Ethnography and participant observation. In: DeLyser D, Herbert S, Aitken S, Crang M, and McDowell L (eds) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography. Los Angeles: Sage.