The problem of participation: ethnography and protest

The course of producing an ethnography can be chaotic, even confusing, and difficult to describe. The fact that it can be hard to develop upon existing methods as well as the impossibility of ethnographic work to be reproduced comes with a number of ethical considerations. The most pressing reflections concerning the wellbeing of participants but they also relate to the legitimacy of research that is produced. A recurring reflection that I’ve had to make concern the method of participant observation, or participation as a researcher in general. 

The problem of participation that occurs, is easily illustrated by some first hand experiences during a research about social movements. For a university exercise, I attended a march for International Women's Day in Rotterdam, because I thought this would be an easy event to practice participant observation. It was rainy during the day; me and my friend who joined wore winter coats. Years later, I still remember the contrast of my stiff and cold fingers with the organizers who were on stage without coats, bare legs, some showing their bras. My friend and I exchanged glances of surprise several times during the event, because they seemed so cold to us. From start to finish the demonstration took about 80 minutes, during which I walked around the square where the podium was placed and the audience gathered four or five times. However, I was limited in my freedom to move around in the crowd because of safety in relation to COVID, and was particularly focussed on this because my friend’s mother was very ill so we couldn’t take risks. This limiting experience seemed to fit the theme of organizers there however, who are part of a collective called “Feminists Against Ableism”. One of whom spoke the following words on stage: “It is very difficult for me to have access to many places in the Netherlands, even as a citizen. The Netherlands is still very inaccessible. Look at how difficult it was for me to get on this stage, because I am in a wheelchair I had to be carried. [...] It is tempting to vote only for your own rights. To only practice what is good for you and don’t think about anybody else. But that erodes a vibrant society. We need tools to help people in a healthy society.” These words ring particularly true when considering the problem of participation - and there are important parallels between what that means as a researcher or a person navigating Dutch society.

The more obvious problem with participation is rooted in a society that has ableism ingrained into it. It means that if we speak of ‘participation’, that already means to participate with western ideals and norms that dominate a society filled with harmful working and living conditions, increasing wealth inequality, ecological crises and so on. It means participating in a value system that glorifies an (imagined) autonomous human being who is on top of the food chain, rational, economically independent and self-interested. These supposed characteristics of a modern human being are deeply exclusionary, ableist, often racist and sexist. Ableism, defined by Campbell and others as “a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then, is cast as a diminished state of being human.” can be said to be ingrained into the enlightenment values of the rational human being. It is also not hard to see how sexist and racist tropes flow from these systems of thought. Yet this is what is often evoked when talking about ‘participation’ and ‘inclusion’. The skill of participant observation is often given to able bodied ethnographers, and a scientific method that has been enmeshed with the supremacist and ableist ways of thinking that I’ve tried to illustrate. The moment that I’ve needed to take measures because of COVID related risks, I became acutely aware of the privileges that are needed to perform ethnography. It put me in the awkward position of needing an ableist system to legitimize and build my research on feminist disability activism. Was I even participating then? Wasn’t I just perpetuating the very systems that the protesters are critiquing?

Moreover, this is not where the problem of participation stops. These ways of supremacist thinking have plunged the earth into a terrifyingly precarious state. We’re invited to actively destroy the planet we need, and want, to be our home. So now what? How do we say no to participating in this system and cultivate attitudes of resistance as ethnographers? Where are the possibilities? A thinker that I often turn to when I engage with these questions is Anna Tsing. In her work The Mushroom at the End of the World she (and her team) devotes herself to a new understanding of the current state of being, beyond terms of calculation, progress, the Anthropocene or Human-centeredness, and to what she calls the ruins of capitalism and an 'art of noticing' — to the entanglements within a multispecies world. It fits into a tradition of thinkers who critically approach discourses about modernization and progress. The promise of Tsing embraces as it were, the imaginative possibilities of people's 'intertwining' in ecological systems and with each other; to do this it adopts a multidisciplinary approach between natural and cultural sciences. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, she focuses on the matsutake mushroom, which has the peculiar and important characteristic that it cannot be cultivated or scaled up in production. Yet great economic and social value is attributed, especially in Japan, to the mushroom. ‘Salvage accumulation’, meaning the scaling up of valuable entities like organisms, is a foundation of capitalism that these mushrooms thus resist. Making use of valuable entities initially produced outside a capitalist system by scaling it up, according to Tsing, an important feature of capitalism. Just as salvage accumulation is a feature of capitalism where characteristics of entities are translated into a money-based value system, Tsing says science dominantly works as a translation machine as well. Diversity in scientific approaches and knowledge production, that doesn’t reduce entities to mechanistic principles, cannot be described in terms of laws or linear progress but manifest as ‘assemblages’. They are ‘open-ended gatherings’ of humans and non-humans. She summarizes the attempts to describe these gatherings of different rhythms and scales as ‘the art of noticing’. 

This approach transforms the meaning of participation as well. Participation becomes a 'world building project' where people gather in an open-ended way; where nature and culture, economics and ecology, micro and macro are intertwined. Tsing enchants the world and provides a useful framework to reinterpret what participation is: namely that even under capitalist systems, it is not linear or predictable but multidirectional, uncontrollable and 'open-ended'. This opens us up to a fairer relationship with non-humans but also with all excluded people, neurodiverse people, people of colour, those fleeing war, women and queer people.