Analyze This!

Since the beginning of this course, I’ve articulated concerns I have about power relationships between the researchers and researched. One of the ways that power is exercised is through redefining the experience through “analysis” and placement within categories, as deemed by the researcher. In seeking to research these concerns, I’ve been reading Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook, Beyond Methodology (Indiana University Press, 1991). They’ve tackled the tough issues in research from a perspective that adopts feminist values. I’ve written about the subject/object issue and the nearly impossible problem of power within the researcher/research subject relationship. The Acker essay also address the question of analysis when they adopt a principle that research consistent with feminist values should continually develop a feminist critical perspective that questions dominant intellectual traditions and can reflect on its own development (Acker, 133.) They observe that their commitment to minimizing the power differentials of the relationship in research was further confounded when it came to analysis. They recognize the problems in attempting to produce an analysis which goes beyond the researched while granting them full subjectivity. They posed the question: “How do we explain the lives of others without violating their reality?” (Acker, 142.) In the course of trying to analyze their research, they became frustrated with the complexity of the material which did not lend itself to categorization. Acker says “Both the ways in which we were categorizing experience and the kinds of categories we then developed were still somewhat antithetical to or theoretical position” (Acker, 143.)
Ackers relies on her theoretical beginnings in Marxism, feminism and critical theory. She concludes by observing that “…in the process of analysis we refined and reshaped our initial questions, trying to make the act of objectification analogous to a moment of critical reflection. The concepts and questions that are central in our final report are different from those with which we started” (Acker, 144.)
We are just beginning the process of analysis, but like Ackers, I find my own commitment to dialectical analysis and commitment to allowing the subjects to speak their own truth to be contrary to the use of rigid categories. In following Ackers, I am struggling to make this act of objectification more a moment of critical reflection. I got this idea for this project when I was in family court in Jefferson County. I was arguing a minor point with great eloquence when the judge remarked that she couldn’t hear me. Here I was, in this spanking new expensive court and the judge can’t even hear me. What was this architect thinking?
But then, my first background interview with the architect reminded me that the architect responds to the client. So much for blaming the architects for injustice. As we’ve progressed through the interviews and I try to critically reflect, I also find that my initial inquiry was really based on a sense that the architects seem to be striving for beauty and we need function. However, in the stories that have emerged, I am hearing a lot more than function and beauty. There is an incredible, complex functioning of the space in courthouses which creates ease, intimacy, clumsiness, aloofness, or any of a thousand other spatial relationships between people. These spatial relationships in many ways reflect or create the dynamic relationships of the participants in the judicial proceedings.
Delving further into the broad notions of categories and seeking the critical reflection which is demanded by Marxism, feminism and critical theory, I also see how narrow my initial vision may have been. In the interviews that have been conducted thus far, and even in the old books in the back room, justice is not about lots of natural light, beautiful paintings or comfortable chairs. Justice is not even about poor acoustics or making the defendant sit behind a glass partition. Justice is about relationships. Those relationships are those between the judges and lawyers and litigants and jurors. But even more, the relationships that are created and sustained in the courthouse are about the community and the bonds of the citizens to one another. The creation of space for the community to facilitate relationships based in equality, fairness, and peace is the function of the courthouse.