More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

Abstract

it is both unsurprising and reassuring that the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy would host an invited lecture on community-university research collaborations. One of the most distinctive features of the tradition of philosophy on this continent has been the insistence that lived experience is the ultimate source of knowledge, and, more importantly, amelioration of individual and collective community experience is the ultimate criterion for validation of knowledge relations. Dr. Ira Harkavy and the Netter Center at which he works represent a version of that ideal made institutionally manifest.In his 2022 Coss Lecture, Harkavy offers a vision for how the ideal of knowledge generation grounded in community experience and serving community priorities could be institutionalized in major US research universities. Furthermore, he makes the case that this transformation of research universities would revitalize our collective commitment to democratic citizenship and governance. It is an appealing vision, earnestly offered. In what follows, I celebrate the merits of this vision but raise concerns that it does not adequately consider questions about the ontology of experience. I review some of those questions and offer suggestions about what an updated ontology of experience, one that could revitalize democracy in the manner Harkavy says is needed, would look like.A short personal introduction will provide context for (and perhaps lend credibility to) my response comments. I am a Professor of Education at the University of Oregon with affiliate appointments in the Department of Philosophy and in the Department of Ethnic Studies. My empirical research focuses on how we prepare anti-racist educators to work in public schools (Pratt and Rosiek; Rosiek, “School Segregation”; Mitchell and Rosiek; Sconiers and Rosiek). My area of theoretical specialization is the development of new qualitative methodologies for research on educational equity. The latter involves working out the implications of different epistemologies and ontologies for educational inquiry and practice. Specifically, I have spent most of my career looking at the way teachers’ classroom experiences can be a valid source of general knowledge about educational practice and policy (Rosiek and Atkinson; Rosiek and Gleason).Both branches of my scholarship exist in a dialectic with my community activism around educational equity issues. My largest project to date was a ten-year study of the racial resegregation of a public school district, looking at how students and teachers navigated its aftermath (Rosiek and Kinslow). My most recent project involved two years of working with teachers all over the world to identify the ways they addressed equity challenges during the pandemic and to identify the institutional conditions that helped or hindered such work (DeRosia et al.). In a less academic context, I have worked with local educational activist organizations in my home community to support the needs of immigrant families and students, to create safer spaces for LGBTQIA students, and to get more equity-minded school board members elected.I share all of this just to clarify that I am familiar with the challenge of putting university expertise in the service of community improvement and, more specifically, promoting equity in educational institutions. I am familiar with approaching research in a manner that respects practitioners and non-academic community members as sources of knowledge, not just objects of knowledge.From the vantage point that experience provides me, I want to offer energetic praise for the work that Harkavy and the Netter Center have been doing these last three decades. We should all recognize the difficulty of integrating the university's knowledge-producing role with local education and service work (Brewer; Harkavy et al.). It is even more difficult to do so when aspiring to the ideal of collaborative knowledge production with the community in a manner that genuinely commits to epistemic egalitarianism. Service learning can be trivialized and can become the exploitative enlistment of unpaid labor in the service of an agenda exogenous to both the participants and the community (Santiago-Ortiz; Stoecker).Sharing the power of designing the focus and means of service projects involves much more emotional labor and relational work (Greene 146; Syeed et al. 5–6). It runs against the grain of neoliberal assumptions that expert knowledge is best established outside of the context of application to guard against bias. A locally grounded collaborative approach to knowledge generation, however, can pay dividends in terms of developing more relevant strategies for amelioration and building local capacity for organized social action.This kind of work is difficult to achieve because it doesn't proceed from theoretical premise to implementation like an Aristotelian practical knowledge syllogism. It does not and cannot unfold according to some prescriptive playbook (Teeters et al. 277–78; Warren et al. 2248). This is work that pushes against the intensifying undemocratic trend toward centralized state control of public services, driven by “big data” and “data science” measures of efficiency that function to invalidate local knowledges (Helbing et al.; O'Neil). The work that Harkavy describes is a form of democratic resistance to this trend. It begins with building relationships in particular contexts and creating knowledge and knowledge-generating capacity tailored to those circumstances. I am sincere in my praise for this work because I have seen that such projects have a positive impact in communities and enhance the quality of the insights produced in the applied social sciences.It is against the backdrop of this praise and respect that I want to raise some questions—not so much about the specific work of the Netter Center, but about these kinds of community-university collaborations and about the vision of social transformation led by universities using a “new epistemology” that Harkavy advocated for in his lecture—one based on respect for locally emergent knowledge (Harkavy 57).Harkavy's remarks are premised on an earnest and at times inspiring optimism about the power of local, place-based practitioner experience to provide the means for social amelioration. He is in good company, as this is a central theme in John Dewey's pragmatism, and arguably all classical pragmatism. Dewey presciently warned in Experience and Nature: The most serious indictment to be brought against nonempirical philosophies is that they have cast a cloud over the things of ordinary experience. They have not been content to rectify them. They have discredited them at large. In casting aspersion on the things of everyday experience, the things of action and affection and social intercourse, they have done something worse than fail to give these affairs the intelligent direction they so much need. . . . The serious matter is that philosophies have denied that common experience is capable of developing from within itself methods which will secure direction for itself and will create inherent standards of judgment and value . . . I cannot calculate how much of current cynicism, indifference, and pessimism is due to these causes and the deflection of intelligence they have brought about. (Dewey 40–41)In his address, Harkavy inventories the manifestations of these deflections of intelligence in contemporary university culture and renews Dewey's call for a practice of knowledge generation that takes respect for lived experience as its central guide. Boldly, Harkavy sees a central role for research universities—the exact institutions arguably most responsible for enforcing untoward epistemic hierarchies—in increasing our respect for local knowledges. He finds in this respect the means not only to local amelioration, but also to achieving larger goals like defending democracy, addressing significant social inequalities, decreasing racism, combatting anti-science rhetoric, and reversing the increasing distrust in our major social institutions (Harkavy 52).I am in profound solidarity with those goals, but I am less sanguine about the means proposed. As the above quote from Dewey illustrates, the general ideal of respecting practitioner-generated knowledge is not really a “new” epistemology, although it may be increasingly rare in institutions of higher education. My experience with collaborative research with teachers, community action research projects, and service-learning curricula convinces me that it often has ameliorative effects on a local scale. However, it does not convince me that these practices are adequate to effect larger-scale social transformations. I think historical and practical evidence suggests that the kind of “action-based” epistemologies that Harkavy rightly celebrates often get co-opted into reproducing problematic social and institutional formations.Kurt Lewin's action research, for example, originally a radically democratic challenge to the anti-democratic function of social science expertise, is now used most often to enlist teachers, social workers, and nurses in finding more efficient ways to implement state-mandated programs of reform (Anderson et al. 9; McNiff 190). Or it is used to organize a community in securing grant funding from government agencies or foundations whose agendas are set by others. Community action research projects rarely are about ways to organize resistance to larger, more systemic problems like institutionalized racism, structural wealth inequality, and technocratic authoritarianism. For that matter, externally funded university research rarely focuses on how to advance such social transformation, almost always focusing instead on projects of “revealing” or “clarifying” problems. Intervention programs funded by federal agencies or foundations are almost always neoliberal incrementalist projects designed to modify institutional function at the margins, but not to change them (Ayers and Saad-Filho 608; Bruff and Tansel 234).For example, there is ample evidence that racially desegregating schools is arguably the most effective educational equity policy ever conceived, even if it was only partially implemented (Rosiek, “School Segregation” 10; Orfield and Lee 5–7), but it is currently a political third rail. No Colleges of Education I know have made desegregating their local schools a mission goal. No federal grants support building capacity toward this end. No action research project has effectively taken on effecting that sort of change. We should at least be curious as to why this is so.Hopefully, these doubts are uncontroversial. Harkavy alluded to the limitations of the “implementation revolution” in higher education for which he advocates. He said: Calling for a democratic civic university and describing what it should do are, of course, relatively easy. It is much harder to figure out what specifically needs to change. It is even harder to identify how to bring about the desired change. I now turn to these difficult implementation questions. Let me admit upfront that my responses, alas, are much too general and lack a satisfying “here to there” (from the neoliberal to the democratic civic university) strategy. (Harkavy 54)I think it is worth dwelling on what Harkavy calls a “here to there strategy” and on why, 150 years after Peirce first coined the pragmatic maxim, we still lack an effective approach to activating the link between knowledge and deep social change. I do not think this lack can be defensibly attributed to an absence of opportunity for collective experimentation with Deweyan notions of democratic education. We have had ample time to experiment with these ideas. Kurt Lewin's idea of action research is everywhere (Burnes and Bargal 97–100). Donald Schön's ideas about reflective practice are among the most widely cited and influential in multiple professional fields of study. I agree with Harkavy that top-down, patronizing, colonialist, patriarchal, imperial knowledge projects emanating from the academy have often done as much harm as good, at least in the social sciences. However, grassroots epistemologies—whether in the form of teacher practical knowledge research, community participatory action research, or reflection in practice—have had their share of excesses and limitations as well (Bennett 27). Provincialism is not always an ally of justice or amelioration, as there are always differences and power dynamics present in social settings, even on the smallest local scale.Lest I sound like an old-school Marxist, forever grumbling about the limits of individualism and always finding ideological complicity in everyone else's work, let me state plainly that I am no more persuaded of the efficacy of critical theoretical analysis that focuses primarily on exposing the contradictions in practitioner knowledge and popular ideas about social reform. Such critique does not by itself provide affirmative programs of social change. Like collaborative community knowledge projects, ideological critique has its place—both are arguably necessary components of any serious social change effort. However, they are not sufficient to achieve the more ambitious goals that Harkavy describes and I share.Some of the work that needs to be done is undoubtedly political, but I believe there is philosophical work to be done as well. To accomplish the more ambitious ends to which Harkavy calls us, I think we need not only a revised epistemology, but also a revised ontology. I am referring to something more than the classical pragmatists’ ontology of experience. Although the ontological intervention staged by Peirce, James, and Dewey against Anglo-empiricism and continental rationalism has great merit, their work does not adequately address the complications of power dynamics, the constantly shifting and evolving nature of social oppression, and what the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have taught us about our complicity with assemblages of social violence. Jane Addams's immersive narrative approach to social inquiry gets closer, but even her work has an optimism about the epistemic and institutional impact that simply listening better to others will have, an optimism that appears unwarranted a century later. We need a more robustly political ontology of experience that moves beyond a rhetoric of recognition and generic calls to respect experience as a source of knowledge. We need an ontology that provides guidance for navigating political and ethical conflicts embedded within the construct of “experience” without pretending to transcend that experience.It is not the case that throwing off the chains of centralized technocratic rationality will liberate fully formed and prepared local knowledges to guide us out of our epistemic cages to a transformed social world. That is because we are the cages—our habits of thought and feeling, our very sense of selfhood, are contiguous with the institutions on which we rely for our livelihood and identities. Local experiences are thoroughly structured by institutionalized ways of thinking and being that are themselves a part of the social ills that Harkavy generously presumes we all want to transform. Our experience teaches us to conform. Institutions are us. The very idea that some kind of knowledge, experiential or transcendentally authoritative, can save us from this predicament is not only naïve, but also is arguably a core part of the mechanics of imperialism, a habit of manufacturing an innocence that deflects our attention from our embeddedness in the social problems we face.I agree with Harkavy that the inclination of higher education to pretentions of exclusive epistemic authority is often a part of the problem our democracy faces, and that closer collaboration with the communities we serve and in which universities are located would go some distance toward minimizing pretention to anti-democratic forms of authority. However, a great deal rides on whose experience we bring in, whose experience we leave out, and how much of our current institutions and cultural norms we are willing to give up. For example, how many of us are willing right now to give up a tenure line in our department to a community elder? Even if we might eventually consider such a thing, what conditions would make it possible? How much would the institution need to change? Would such community experts get to decide on tenure for more traditional scholars based on how relevant their work was to efforts to improve community life? If not, why not? If so, what would such an arrangement mean for medieval historians, astronomers, social scientists studying global social patterns, or engineering faculty working on projects sponsored by the military?Harkavy's vision of amelioration seems transformative but does not yet acknowledge the scope of the alterations that this would require in terms of daily practices, institutional processes, and status relations in modern universities. This silence seems to suggest that the transformation he envisions would be limited, that its main purpose is to bring the benefits of current scholarly expertise to local communities, but not to cause local service to reach back and transform the nature of expertise nor the core functions of the university. Perhaps this is strategy, a version of the insurrectionist virtue of deceit designed to get a foot in the door—the hope being that, once scholarship is embedded in and tied to local community needs, material and personal connections would drive a transformation far deeper than promised. If so, I am in, and I regret highlighting these concerns.However, the emphasis on the necessary centrality of the modern research university makes me doubt this strategic interpretation of Harkavay's vision. That seems as much about preserving the current form of academic practice as it is about preserving democracy; it empowers precisely those constituencies, discourses, and institutions that currently conspire against the epistemic democratization he says is needed.There are other visions of foundational change to the relation between academic practices and ameliorating social conditions. For example, we might consider how Harkavy's “implementation revolution” compares to Indigenous Studies scholar Sandy Grande's call for “Refusing the University.” Grande advocates refusing the modern academy's commodified monopoly on knowledge for reasons that sometimes sound similar to those of Harkavy. She encourages collaborative knowledge production, an ethic of mutuality and reciprocity, and being answerable to multiple communities whom we serve as scholars. However, she is less sanguine about the instrumental value of the high-status research university in any coming social transformation. She draws attention to its history as an integral part of justifying settler colonialism and anti-Black violence and of disempowerment of those communities: [T]he academy [is] an arm of the settler state—a site where the logics of elimination, capital accumulation, and dispossession are reconstituted—which is distinct from other frameworks that critique the academy as fundamentally neoliberal, Eurocentric, and/or patriarchal. I argue that this shift opens up more possibilities for coalition and collusion within and outside the university. (Grande 47)Grande's vision is, ultimately, more ambitious and more challenging to the contemporary form of the university than the vision Harkavy proposes. It calls for us to put the epistemic authority of academic practices at greater risk—not just exporting our disciplined methodologies and putting them at the service of the priorities of local communities, but to have the very purpose of those disciplines and methodologies challenged and reconstituted in the process of substantive collaboration.It is beyond the scope of this response paper to develop an alternative ontology that could provide scaffolding for this more radical transformation of the university—and let us be clear: the goals that Harkavy espouses are radical, even if the means he proposes are not. Fortunately, a great deal of work toward this kind of ontology is already being done. In closing, I will point to two bodies of theory that I think will be important resources for any such effort.First, some of the best thinking about the dysfunctional relationship between imperial knowledge projects associated with universities and projects of social amelioration can be found in contemporary Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, anti-Blackness theory, Afro-futurism, and Indigenous Studies scholarship. These theoretical frameworks all suggest in various ways that we need to leaven an ontology that respects experience as a source of knowledge with careful attention to the limitations, affective traps, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, inevitable moral injury, and difficult trade-offs that history and current affairs impose on our experience. In other words, we need a little more pessimism and maybe a little less optimism in our ontology of experience. This kind of pessimism is not a fatalism. It is not giving up. It is, instead, a form of relational realism—a respect for the scope of the challenge and an acknowledgment that no project of revelation, politics of recognition, or epistemic intervention will be adequate to realize the espoused goals. Grande's call for a practice of refusing the university draws on this kind of fugitive realism.This pessimism also entails an acknowledgment that the work of transformation will never be finished. It doesn't promise fixes or a watershed of revitalization (a rhetoric that we know is often appealing to wealthy donors and mercurial policy makers). Oppressive social and cultural systems change, adapt, and re-emerge in different forms and thus evade final description and resolution (Alexander 21; Rosiek and Kinslow xxviii–xxxiv; Rosiek, “Critical Race Theory”). An unqualified optimism about the power of local, place-based, personal experience to reveal the means to large-scale social amelioration is not only unsupported by the historical and empirical evidence, but it also lulls us into being unprepared for the ongoing hard work of personal and relational transformation entailed by institutional change—change that will be characterized by internal and external conflict, loss, setbacks, and the likely unending work of resisting protean forms of systemic oppression. Contemporary Black Studies scholarship offers theories of fugitivity, as opposed to only theories of emancipation, as necessary components of any such transformation. These, I offer, provide a more realistic picture of the work of radically democratizing the university. It will involve risk, subversion, and insurrectionist behavior (McBride, Ethics and Insurrection). In the end, the status, function, and authority of the modern research university will likely be changed beyond recognition.The second source of alternative ontologies I will mention can be found in the work of members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The kind of foundational change in the academy being discussed here will require more from our political philosophies than John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, or Donald Schön have given us. These scholars mentioned by Harkavy have contributed a great deal to our understanding of the relationships among epistemology, practice, and democracy. They did not, however, provide an adequate account of the ethical and political conflicts, trade-offs, and tensions that exist not just externally but internally in the very fabric of our lived experience. We need philosophers engaged in building on and moving beyond the work of these canonical figures to forge conceptual tools and affective habits better suited to contemporary social and political challenges.This work is already well underway in the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and in the revisionist movement in American philosophy over the last thirty years. It can be found in the work of scholars like Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Cornel West, Scott Pratt, Erin McKenna, Jacoby Carter, Denise James, Lee McBride, Marilyn Fischer, and many others. This scholarship has expanded the American philosophical canon and, in so doing, has expanded the range of experiences that inform our understanding of knowledge, reality, and desirable amelioration. It is challenging inherited notions of progress, re-imagining the relationship of knowledge to justice and deepening our conceptions of the practices of pluralism. In my opinion, the value of this revision of the American Philosophical canon has been underappreciated. Harkavy's project of enlisting the university in the revitalization of democracy provides an apt illustration of the practical relevance of this important philosophical work.Harkavy's call for re-imagining the future of the university is warranted for all the reasons he enumerates and more. However, the conceptual resources upon which he draws for this re-visioning are dated. His laudable goals would be better served by drawing upon some of the social theory and philosophy just mentioned, which would necessarily alter the ultimate vision of amelioration itself. We should expect that this will expand not just the range of our epistemologies and how we see ourselves at the university, but also our understanding of experience itself, as well as our ethics, politics, and conceptions of democracy and community.