When we read published research results, the results often seem a little too pat, and slot too conveniently into the theoretical framework set up in the opening sections of the article. What we don’t often see are research results where this is not the case. But such neatness belies what theory is supposed to be: a proposed explanation that is then subject to empirical testing. As such, research results that contradict expected theoretical findings are equally important to those that confirm theoretical paradigms. Yet, as we all know, this isn’t what typically shows up in published research.
This special issue is the result of a call for essays that explore situations where the researchers’ theoretical paradigms collided with complexity of culture and place in the field – where the theoretical backdrop that the researchers expected to undergird their work did not pan out. We were not looking for research that set out deliberately to disprove an existing theory, we were looking for stories of research projects where findings contradicted what the researchers themselves expected, and challenged their own assumptions and theoretical proclivities.
Theory, in theory, is an idea that purports to explain a given phenomenon. In reality, we use the word “theory” inconsistently. Sometimes, we use it to refer to methodological approaches (actor-network theory, for example). Other times, it is more a statement of focus – of what the researcher plans to investigate – and an overarching sensibility (think non-representational theory). Sometimes, it is simply an analytical or organizational framework, a way of presenting and analyzing information in a systematic fashion. Other times, meanwhile, it is a stand-in for ideology.
Regardless of the way we use the term, what is often lacking is what should be central to any sort of scholarly inquiry – are we, in our work, providing an opportunity to encounter evidence that our theories, and that we ourselves, could be wrong? Because if we’re not, we’re not much better than our crazy relative on Facebook who seizes on any piece of distorted evidence as long as it backs up their own preconceived biases, and who ignores any evidence to the contrary. In other words, we are ideologues. And while pure ideology can make for snappy political slogans, it makes for poor scholarship.
Theoretical name-dropping can also be a substitute for actual critical thinking – I can’t count the number of articles I’ve gotten as an editor that give a quotation from, say, David Harvey, or Martin HeideggerFootnote1, or whoever, in lieu of actual argument or evidence from the researcher’s own study – as if, because so-and-so said something, that makes it true in all times and in all places and among all people.
I remember in graduate school when I was first attending AAG conferences while working on my thesis, and later, on my dissertation. One of the most common questions I heard wasn’t “what are you studying?,” but rather, “what is your theoretical framework?” I wasn’t comfortable with the question at the time, but couldn’t really articulate why. I think, in retrospect, a big part of my unease lay with the certainty that such a statement tended to carry with it, the sense that you should know what you’re going to find before you start looking, and should know what tool you need to understand something that you have yet to examine first-hand. Would you ask a carpenter whether they were a hammerian or a proponent of screwdriverism before hiring them? The absurdity of such a question is self-evident.
In vernacular usage, when we say “in theory”, what we mean is that we know full well that reality will probably be at odds with an idealized presentation. But in our scholarly work, we often forget that part of it. The field – when we go out and actually interact with the world we are analyzing – can be a powerful curative for certainty and absolutism. Ideally, our understanding of the world is rooted in both theory and empiricism, in dialogue with each other. The five articles in this special issue each deal in their own way with situations where the theory that the researchers went into the field with and expected to inform their work turned out to be not such a good fit after all.
Cara Kronen, Molly Vollman Markris, and Te-Sheng Huang’s article “Young Men of Color in Privately-Owned Public Spaces: Unexpected Findings” explores the importance of listening to people. In their fieldwork in private-public spaces, they went into their work expecting to find what the literature often argued were inherently hostile and unwelcoming environments for young people of color. By listening to the young men in their study, however, they found that the perceptions of the study participants were, in fact, more nuanced and complicated than the scholarship on the topic had led them to believe.
Cerian Gibbes and Emily Skop, in “The Messiness of Co-Produced Research with Gatekeepers of Resettled Refugee Communities” look at theories surrounding the way that research is produced. Gibbes and Skop went into the field with a research framework – the idea of co-production of research – and some expectations about how it would work, but found that the literature creates a too-simplistic everybody-wins portrait of the complexity of carrying out such research, particularly when gatekeeping organizations with their own ideas about the project are added into the picture.
Over the past few decades, the importance of positionality – of reckoning with the effects of your own identities and background, and the intersections between those identities and power relations, on your research – has become clear. Jordan P. Brasher, in “Positionality and Participatory Ethics in the Global South,” shows how devilishly difficult this can prove to be in reality, and the ways that his own self-presentation and self-conception was decidedly at odds with how those with whom he was working – Confederate celebrators and Afro-Brazilian groups – saw him.
Aju James, in “Splintering Urbanism and Nationalism in the World-Class City,” uses the unconventional lens of stand-up comedy production in Mumbai to explore the complexities surrounding the conflicting impulses of globalization and nationalism, and finds how some oft-articulated ideas about the relationship between globalization and national identity have failed to account for the reality of a resurgent nationalism.
The final article in this issue is Josepha Milazzo’s “Migration, Ethnicism, and Transnationalism Versus the Right to Assume Citizenship by One’s (Multi-) Presence in the World.” When Milazzo went into the field to research Bolivian migrants in Spain, she expected to find transnational connections and practices between the migrants and their home country; what she found instead required her to rethink her entire approach to her study participants.
Theory can be a powerful tool, and it is a vital part of research. But we must always also provide ourselves the opportunity to discover that we’re wrong, that there are, in fact, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The articles in this special issue show us the importance of such openness as a means to create better theories and to obtain a greater understanding of our world.
Notes
1 Whose unrepentant Nazism should, at the very least, give one pause before invoking him as an authority figure.