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ABSTRACT
This project responds to a set of methodological challenges for the critical commitments of rhetorical fieldwork and investigates how community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods can help address them. As an example, we draw on Bailey Flynn’s CBPR research with Resilience, a not for-profit “rape crisis center” that provides services and therapy to thousands each year in Illinois. CBPR, like participatory critical rhetoric (PCR) methods, privileges field data as objects of rhetorical analysis. Unlike PCR and other approaches, CBPR methods prioritize the formalization of collaborative relationships with community stakeholders at every stage of research. We argue that greater integration of CBPR methods in rhetorical field methods will aid in privileging the epistemological perspectives of community stakeholders, solidifying critical communication scholarship’s commitment to conducting research with consequences, and providing a common ground for interdisciplinary exchange between critically trained rhetoric scholars and qualitative communication researchers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Bailey Flynn provides this piece with case study analysis and experience with CBPR methods. R.L. Bince provides background in critical rhetoric’s disciplinary and methodological history. Sarah Layden, the Chief Operating Officer of Resilience, provides content edits and expertise from the sexual assault service community.
2. “Projects of inclusion don’t rupture oppressive structures; instead they uphold and reinforce those structures by showing how they can be kinder and gentler and better without actually changing much at all” (Chávez, Citation2015, p. 166).
3. In Flynn and her community partners’ case, project closure is ongoing at time of writing. Deliverables may include a public program at Resilience to share findings with survivors/clients or a coauthored report with recommendations to the Board of Directors.
4. The full requirements for interview participants in this study included being over 18 years of age, self-identifying via screening survey as belonging to one of the groups above, residing in the state of Illinois, and speaking English at or near fluency. This final requirement narrowed the population of our study significantly. As described on p. 31, the complex and neoliberal funding context for community-based participatory research (particularly, as in this case, by an early career scholar) can restrict possibilities for capacious CBPR projects. In this case, Flynn’s own monolingualism and a lack of funding to support IRB-certifying and training a translator meant that non-English speaking stakeholders in the sexual violence community were left out of this study. This is an oversight that can and should be remedied in further field projects on the subject.
5. All interviewee names used in this article are pseudonyms selected by the participants and used with their permission.
6. This is a reprise of the problem of relativity that Cloud pointed to in the Marxist objection to relativistic Foucauldian influence in critical rhetoric: without a stable and ontological set of political commitments, our critique itself will lack “criteria for judgment and action” (Cloud, Citation2020, p. 834).
7. A notable exception is Black Feminist Health Science Studies (Bailey & Peoples, Citation2017).
8. These are, of course, not the only grounds for interdisciplinary exchange opened up by CBPR. We assert that translating findings into accessible information and community action is also a form of interdisciplinarity because it transcends the disciplinary boundary between the university walls and forms of knowledge-production taking place beyond it.
9. Further discussion is needed on the complexities and opportunities of approaching this kind of critical rhetorical fieldwork from a community-engaged methodology. As Flynn’s research shows, CBPR can prompt and hold space for community partners’ reflexive analysis and self-criticism. We encourage further discussion on the ethics of adapting the spectrum of community-engaged methods to work within communities the researcher deems fundamentally unjust, with dual goals of analyzing the rhetoric of injustice and prompting the reconsideration of those rhetorics by the communities using them.
10. We note how the reflexive “critique of freedom” helps to guard against this existing critique of CBPR methods.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bailey F. Flynn
Bailey Flynn (Ph. D., Northwestern University, 2024) is a graduate researcher in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her research expertise includes sexual violence studies, the rhetoric of health and medicine, community-based participatory research, and pain and trauma communication.
R. L. Bince
R. L. Bince is a graduate researcher at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. His research uses field and archival methods to investigate how crowd management and control rhetorics evolve over time.
Sarah Layden
Sarah Layden is the Chief Operating Officer with Resilience. In her current role, she oversees the administration of advocacy, trauma therapy and education training programs in partnership with Resilience program leadership, staff, interns and volunteers. She is a sought-after trainer, specializing in trauma-informed approaches to working with survivors in variety of institutional and legal settings.