Iswari Pandey’s chapter “Researching (With) the Postnational “Other”” reflects his interest and investment in transnational, global as well as literacy issues and concern with research ethics and methodologies. As a self-reflexive ethnographer, Pandey explores “the limits and possibilities of researching digital literacy practices through the lens of a postnational perspective” (107). Building on the theoretical framework of postnationality and postnational literacy practices occasioned by the transnational move of people, capital and cultures or phenomena of globalization, he further explores and illustrates the complexities-excitement and challenges- involved in researching with postnational subjects and their digital literacy practices.
As does he in his own digital literacy narrative elsewhere, he tracks ideological underpinnings in digital literacy practices of postnational subjects here too and also attests to what Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe have characterized digital spaces as being, apart from sites for literacy practices, also “sites where different forms of oppression are reproduced: sexism, racism, colonialism, and homophobia” (qtd in Pandey 113). He finds digital space/s highly contested as are they fraught with competing set of ideologies vying for manipulation and exploitation of the postnational subjects.
Though Pandey’s major aim here is to explore gamers’ literacy development in a cultural context, his self-reflexivity towards the end is very revealing and insightful. Spotlighting his research experience with the postnational subjects, the moments of conflicts of objectives and interests between him and his research participants despite their supposed common ground and his misreading of hybridized cultural and linguistic signs produced in them (postnational subjects) by the postnational condition/s, he confesses that researching postnational participants in digital environments is fraught with risks and challenges. Such stakes and challenges lie among others in attracting research participants, understanding and interpreting their responses and representing them in the final research product. He gains a lot of insights from this research experience such as the need of creating reciprocal and collaborative research relationships between the researcher and his/her researcher participants; being more aware of the possibility of conflicts of interests and objectives between and among them despite the shared identity; defining explicitly one’s location as a researcher and understanding the participant-researcher relationship based on a clear understanding and interrogation of location, which, he deems, are instrumental to “ethical inquiry in digital writing research” (124). Similarly, he realizes that the issues of inequity, positionality or cultural/national situatedness of the researcher and research participants are equally important to understand the postnational “Other” better. Thus, for him, constant interrogation and understanding of the location/positionality of the researcher is the most prominent ethical issue while researching the postnational “Other”.
I mostly agree with Pandey’s reflections on digital writing research. Since this chapter is based on his experience as an ethnographer, his ideas and reflections are/should be to a great extent true save the potentiality of spatio-temporal variations. Though I myself align with Pandey’s stand on (post)nationality/nationalism, there are number of ways to complicate his key concept: (post)nationalism. For the purpose of debate/discussion, and since I am reading them all for my final project, I am deliberately putting Pandey and Eileen Schell/ Wendy Hesford face to face. While doing that I am not implying that Schell and Hesford are the advocates of nationalism. Not in kind, but I see between them a difference of degree in their beliefs in nationalism/postnationalism.
I am talking about Wendy S. Hesford and Eileen E. Schell’s introduction to special issue of College English on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism where they argue that the discipline of rhetoric and composition, US-centric and built around the narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship, would
benefit from a more critical engagement with its use of transgeographical concepts (displacement, transculuration, translocality), transnational constructs such as Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Sandars 812), and transnational ethnic configurations (African, African-American, West Indian people; Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Latino/Latin American people; Native American and indigenous people; Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander people), and consideration of the epistemological and historical ties between disciplinary formations and U.S. imperialism. (463)
If I rightly discerned, Hesford and Schell’s call in this special issue is for expanding and opening the discipline’s hitherto closed borders to transnational phenomena and experiences, insights and knowledge systems and discourses thereby extending/expanding the range and scope of “Composition Studies…constructed, indeed disciplined, as a sovereign state” (464) and particularly the feminist rhetorics. Their move is towards incorporating in the curriculum of U.S-based composition programs the ideas and contents about “how composition instruction is taught and engaged across the globe” (464).
My initial impression is that Schell and Hesford stand opposed to Pandey in their views on nation states and their subjects. Pandey terms nations postnations and their subjects postnational/transnational throughout his essay. For him every individual no matter where and how s/he is, is already transnational/postnational given the context of the demise of nation-states as distinct political and cultural unit. Schell and Hesford, however, reject this kind of characterization of nations and their subjects as: “[A]lthough some scholars claim that we live in a psotnationalist state, we align ourselves with those who account for the global reach of nationlist discourses and, more specifically, the power of U.S. policy, media, and military” (463). It may be because Pandey and Schell/Hesford stand in different discourse locations. But questions still linger: what is the role of discourse locations or ideological baggages in research? Do they affect the research methods/methodologies, analytical approaches and outcomes?
3 comments:
Good overview of Pandey's argument.
I think you have accurately characterized the position that Hesford and I take in our introduction to the special issue.
As for diametrically opposing our arguments to that of Pandey's, I think that we are reacting to different sites of research and different rhetorical situations in our pieces. So I think the binary in our positions may be due to theoretical positionings, as you indicate here, but it it also due to taking on different research sites and subjects.
I agree with you, Santosh, about the usefulness of Pandey's self-reflexivity. Even though self-flexivity is a feature of composition that is sometimes bemoaned as paralyzing (I'm thinking here of Karen Kopelson's CCCs article from last year), Pandey presents his reflection in exceedingly productive ways. He reports that failed to fully account for, among other things, the power differential and varied cultural experiences between himself as researcher and his participants as subjects, especially in regards to notions of what it means to invite subjects into collaborative co-authorship (116-18). As Pandey notes about his own project, even though he developed a sense of his location in relation to his ethnographic subjects before his study began, he “did not initially interrogate that location adequately” (124). Also, as you note, he invites all of us to imagine the postnational dimensions of our experience. Despite the frequent figuring of “postnational” as an indicator of foreignness (112), Pandey posits postnationality as a way of understanding “the porous and conflictual nature of an individual’s relationship to culture and nationness” as well as a site for “imagin[ing] an alterative conception of communities, kinships, and conflicts through deterritorialized modes of contact” (113). This open stance on the nature of postnationality makes me wonder about how this might be a useful reframe for my own work on religion--so often tied to nationalist projects, but which also has the potential to lessen the affective attachments to nation and transfer them a community of affinity.
Reading this essay made me think about ways in which technologies themselves may serve as colonizing and/or oppressive forces. I often tend to think of digital research as having fewer ethical considerations than other methods; however, Pandey's self-reflexivity and ethical discussion encouraged me to think about other ethical considerations we should make when conducting research on/with technology. I think I too often have a utopic vision of the potentials and opportunities for digital spaces without also considering their pitfalls. This essay reminded me that it's important to be critical of the effect that a methodology that employs digital technology or that takes a digital space as its site might be reinforcing oppressive structures that are embedded in and obscured by those technologies/spaces. It makes me want to revisit my Master's thesis and see what ethical issues were present that I overlooked.
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