Shameful interest in educational research

ABSTRACT

This article considers ontological conceptualizations of shame-interest as experienced in educational research. Shame has frequently been reported in research as a property of the autonomous individual: the shame of the participant to share with the researcher, and the shame of the researcher to reflexively eliminate. Shame-interest is re-theorized here as a generative research event, as intra-action, as one simultaneous movement in the ongoing present. We attempt an ethical shift from a reflexive stance to fluxing movements of response-ability and co-consequence in order to encourage socially responsive educational research, informed through the conceptual resources of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Theory is threaded through a series of personal research vignettes to illustrate our thinking through ways shame-interest materialized within research events. Shame is re/conceptualized as a contestable composite feeling entangled with interest that allows an alternate non-reductive and ethical approach to educational research. We amplify our researcher responsibility, and our shame, by placing ourselves as entangled with the research ‘problem’ under investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• interest
• Karen Barad
• research ethics
• response-ability
• shame

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Erratum

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the anonymous peer reviewers and the editors for their constructive feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is the researcher’s ‘responsibility’ to ‘minimise the risks of harm or discomfort to participants’ (National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council, and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, 2015, p. 11). While shame is not included explicitly as a ‘harm’ in the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, shame (as stultifying) may fall within the list of ‘psychological harms’: ‘including feelings of worthlessness, distress, guilt […]’, and/or the harm of ‘devaluation of personal worth: including being humiliated […], and/or ‘social harms: including damage to social networks or relationships to others’ (p. 13).

2. Tomkins’ (1995a) nine ‘primary’ affects are: disgust-contempt, shame-humiliation, fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, surprise-startlement, enjoyment-joy, interest-excitement – but shame is entwined in ‘affect complexes’ rather than part of a ‘competing lists of primary affects’ (pp. 61, 63).

3. Researchers are charged, in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, to be ‘sensitive to the welfare and interests of people involved in their research’; and to reflect ‘on the social and cultural implications of their work’ as ‘beneficence’ (National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council, and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, 2015, p. 9).

4. Both studies received ethics approval from our respective Human Research Ethics Committees; Eve also received ethics approval from the NSW Department of Education and Training’s State Education Research Approval Process (SERAP). In Melissa’s study, predetermined ethical procedures included giving participants the interview questions 2 weeks before the video-recorded interview, discussing the implications of the filming process with participants, inviting participants to choose the location of the filming, the lighting, their clothing, camera shot and angle, checking the test shot, and giving written ‘informed consent’. In Eve’s study, ‘informed consent’ forms were given to both students and their parents, and research principles (for example, anonymity and confidentiality) and processes (focus groups and participatory data analysis) explained to students at an assembly gathering. Participating students were invited to choose who to meet in a focus group with, to choose a convenient time for the focus group during the school day, to craft their own pseudonyms and self-descriptions, and to choose the arts-based medium (puppets, drawings, visual images, embodied role play; see Mayes, 2016b) with which they would explore issues of ‘student voice’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eve Mayes

Dr Eve Mayes - Deakin University, Victoria, Australia

Eve Mayes is a Lecturer in Pedagogy and Curriculum at Deakin University. She was formerly an English and English as Second Language teacher and Head Teacher in public comprehensive secondary schools. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Australian Association for Research in Education’s Ray Debus Award for Doctoral Research in Education (2017). During her doctoral research, she was awarded a Postgraduate Research Award and an Alison Lee Theory in Educational Research’ Scholarship from the Australian Association for Research in Education. Eve’s research is concerned with exploring and problematizing ‘experiences’ of educational institutions, through creative methodological and philosophical experimentation with issues of ‘voice’, affect, space and materiality. She utilizes conceptual resources from poststructural and new materialist thinking to enquire into the (re)production and potential interruption of intersecting inequalities in and through education.

Melissa Joy Wolfe

Dr Melissa Joy Wolfe - Monash University, Clayton campus, Victoria, Australia

Melissa Wolfe works at Monash University as a senior lecturer in Visual Art and Media education. She was awarded International Visual Sociology Association Prosser ECR award (2016) and the Australian Association for Research in Education ECR Award (2016). Her PhD entitled Girls Tales: experiences of schooling was awarded the Mollie Holman Award for best education thesis (2016), Monash University, and a commendation award from the Australian Association of Educational Research (2017). Melissa’s research in high schools utilizes a creative filmic research methodology, engaging with theories of affect that takes account of gender, socio-economic status and public pedagogical practice. She pragmatically thinks with Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism as a conceptual framework. Melissa’s 2015 film, Girls’ tales: experiences of schooling, was developed as a pre-service teaching aid and was released in December 2015 through Ronin Films. Melissa’s feminist research interests in education encompass a filmic synthesis of aesthetics, affect, gender, and participatory creative methods.