Can There Be a Critical Collaborative Ethnography?: Creativity and Activism in the Seventh Ward, New Orleans

Abstract

It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation, and we cannot wield "how life really is out there" as a kind of test against which the political rightness or wrongness of a particular cultural strategy or text can be measured.-stuart hall, "What is this 'black' in black popular culture?"We're going to have to learn to fight. Everything feels good now, and we'll worry later when we disagree that we'll damage our organization or relationships to speak out about it. Really, [if we try to avoid arguments] we'll just make it worse. Knowing how to fight and how to make up builds trust and respect. It balances power. -shana sassoon, community organizer, March 2006The Neighborhood Story Project opened its doors in New Orleans in 2004 with a deceptively simple mission statement: "Our stories told by us" ). The organization, which Rachel co-directs with Abram Himelstein, and in which Helen is an active board member, works with high school students and collaborates with neighbors and "community-based" organizations to create and publish books about neighborhoods around the city. NSP methodology is inspired by the eclectic backgrounds of the people who work under its umbrella. The collaborative anthropologies • volume 2 • 2009 116 •

Enriching indigenous knowledge scholarship via collaborative methodologies: beyond the high tide's few hours

“…As such, the conceptualization of indigenous knowledge as situated and practiced and the use of a collaborative methodologies are mutually reinforcing. I concur with other researchers that collaboration thus bears potential for revitalizing anthropological thought (Lassiter 2005, Hale 2007, Rappaport 2008, Breunlin and Regis 2009, Laborde 2013.…”

“…By more closely collaborating with communities and multiple community members, collaborative research facilitates studies that are targeted to local needs, and its proponents often argue, are more ethnographically engaged with local realities, more readable, and potentially decolonizing (Lassiter 2005, Rappaport 2005, Gow 2008, Breunlin and Regis 2009. Like the approaches known as indigenous or decolonizing methodologies (Smith 2002, Denzin andLincoln 2008), collaborative research also considers that local participants must conduct, own, and benefit from research that is done on, for, or with them.…”

From Collaborative Ethnography to Collaborative Pedagogy: Reflections on the Other Side of Middletown Project and Community–University Research Partnerships

“…Much could surely be theorized here about connecting collaborative and other ethnographic researches to cooperative actions and citizenships as a dimension of applied or public practice—many anthropologists, for example, have long worked toward similar ends (see, e.g., Stull and Schensul 1987), and continue to do so in a wide range of exemplary ways (see, e.g., Breunlin and Regis 2009; Cook 2008; Sanjek 2004). Our particular concern here, however, is how a shared responsibility for collaborative researches may tie into wider possibilities for collaborative engagements in the very specific context of cooperatively conceived community–university research partnerships: that is, between and among community‐ and university‐situated constituencies, where students, faculty, and members of local communities have opportunities to research, learn, work, and act together in the framework of care and responsibility for the communities they collectively inhabit 5…”

Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces

“…When the field site is a counterspace, how might an ethnographer theorize with and not about research participants? These questions drove us to emulate other collaborative ethnographers to create "polyvocality" and account for, and indeed, mobilize racial, social, political, institutional and epistemic differences and the tensions resulting to tell a complex story from a range of viewpoints about the joys and challenges of community action (see Lassiter 2005;Breunlin and Regis 2009;Lassiter et. al.…”