A praxis of radical vulnerability [is one] that is committed to opening spaces for negotiation by always returning us to the ethics of how and why one comes to a story and to its variable tellings and retellings.
Richa Nagar’s Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism is thought-provoking and delightful to me both as an academic and activist. Muddying the waters raises powerful critiques of what feminist research and the knowledge production processes should look like.
The book is an illustrative example of how one can engage in political meaningfulness in academic research and knowledge production. It tells the story of Nagar’s experience during her decades of being a transnational feminist. Nagar shared “stories, encounters and anecdotes” as reflections by co-authoring without claiming the labels of activist scholarship, and without invoking categories such as “transnational,” “postcolonial,” and “women of color.” Nagar asserts that the designation of these categories especially in academic engagements might limit the possibility of solidarity. She illustrates how action research, for instance, occupies a less than prestigious position in academic discourse. She argues that the organizational structure of academia constrains the ability of researchers to engage in activist research. She writes that feminist research focus should be on “learn[ing]—without an expectation of fully accessing—a stranger’s thick histories and complex positioning in time and space, as well as their connections to other places and times that enable such a meeting.” This resonates with Sara Ahmed’s argument to deconstruct “stranger fetishism” (Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, 2000).
I particularly found the story about the boatman and the pundit, (on broad themes of mere knowledge v practical knowledge), interesting, This story illustrates the importance of interrogating what constitutes “knowledge,” and it raises several questions:
- Who becomes the subject of knowledge and who is designated as the ‘pundit’ to produce legitimate knowledge, and disseminate that knowledge? What are the implications of this inequality?
- In terms of my activism and my effort to empower people, it is also important to think about who determines what a community needs?
Nagar asserts that “effective participation in border crossings necessitates a processual approach to reflexivity and positionality, combined with an acute awareness of the place-based nature of our intellectual praxis. Such praxis commits itself to build situated solidarities that can grapple with the larger interconnections produced by the internationalization of economies and labor forces while challenging the colonialist prioritizing of the West.”
Nagar also gave critical insights on co-authorship when she writes:
[…] any long-term collaboration across unequal worlds, the accounting of the nature of benefits and losses cannot be undertaken from the perspective of a single institutional location or by a single member of the alliance. Rather, it is in and through the collaborative moments of reflection and writing that the alliance gains new energy and insights to advance the struggle, to reassess the meanings of what has been gained or lost, and to determine the directions in which new steps might be taken.
She argues that knowledge should be mutually beneficially, underscoring the “necessity and inevitability of becoming radically vulnerable in and through critically self-reflexive collaborations, translations, and co-authorship.” She further writes that “these co-constitutive and ever-evolving labors and processes lie at the heart of struggles to produce knowledge that can travel meaningfully and responsibly within, between, and across worlds.”
I also found how she interrogates the notions of solidarity and responsibility, trust and hope, and vulnerability intriguing. How does one grapple with the complexities of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while engaged in politically charged scholarship? How does one become “radically vulnerable” and using that vulnerability to re-imagine collaborations? Radical vulnerability she writes, “requires all members of an alliance to open ourselves— intellectually and emotionally– to critique in ways that allow us to be interrogated and assessed by one another.”
Nagar underscores the need to muddle the waters, that is, to disrupt and unsettle the traditional categories of methodologies and how we conduct research that adheres to institutional norms and standards. Her book contributes to the debate around the divide between theory and praxis, and scholarship and activism. Nagar invites us to think of how we can ensure that our research impacts the lives of those whom we research?
WHO DECIDES WHAT KNOWLEDGE COUNT AS KNOWLEDGE?
P.S. HERE’S A VIDEO OF ME GIVING A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
