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Article Excerpt
This paper examines the rewards and problematics of doing community-based research in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. British Columbia, It examines how the research process, experiences, and goals of a project may differ depending on one's social location in and outside of the project. Further it highlights collaboration and tensions, especially about class, privilege, and ways of knowing, between faculty, research assistants (RAs), and community-based researchers (CBRs). The Health and Home Research Project, Housing and Health among Low-income Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (H&H project) can be understood as space where collaboration occurred and where structural and personal relations, identities, and the replication of dominance prevailed,
Cet article examine les gains et problemes souleves par la recherche a base communautaire dans le Downtown Eastside de Vancouver, Colombie-Britannique. Il examine la facon dont le processus de recherche, les experiences et objectifs d'un projet peuvent varier selon sa situation sociale a l'interieur et l'exterieur du projet. De plus, il porte a I'attention la collaboration et les tensions entre professeurs, assistants de recherche et chercheurs communautaires, surtout en ce qui a trait a la classe, le privilege et les modalites du savoir. Le projet de recherche. Health and Home, House and Health among Low-income Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, peut etre envisage comme un espace ou la collaboration a eu lieu et ou les relations et identites personnelles et structurales, ainsi que la replication de la dominance ont perdure.
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One of the primary goals of a research project in downtown Vancouver was to provide a space for the voices of low-income women on the links between health and housing. The project, "Health and Home Research Project, Housing and Health among Low-income Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, British Columbia" (H&H Project), was designed to "explore" different ways of doing research that would include the "women as both researchers and research subjects" (Robertson & Culhane, 2005, p. 8). In 2002, project coordinator Dara Culhane and I discussed the possibility that I would interview a sample of the community-based researchers (CBRs) and student research assistants (RAs) who had worked on the Project. (1)
My distance from the everyday running of the project and my familiarity with the Downtown Eastside (DTES) influenced my decision to work on this component of the Health and Home research. I believed, as did the other members of the project, that the CBRs and RAs had much to contribute about their experience of community-based research in the DTES. I also thought that their voices would contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of collaborative research and to the creation of guidelines for future community projects. In addition, I was interested in how the DTES and the H&H Project would be represented by the CBRs and the RAs.
The DTES is one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods. Forty percent of its residents are thought to be Aboriginal and 20 percent East Asian and Latino/a. Robertson and Culhane make clear that it is not an "accident nor coincidence that a disproportionate number of people living in poverty" in the DTES are Aboriginal; the city of Vancouver rests on territory that was held by Coast Salish First Nations peoples for thousands of years (Robertson & Culhane, 2005, p. 16). Colonization and the forced dispossession of Aboriginal peoples shapes what is known as the DTES today.
For many contemporary readers, the DTES came to their attention in the late 1990s when media reports about out of control, visible drug use gained national attention. Contemporary claims about drug use in the DTES are not new. The DTES has long been constructed as a site of legal and illegal drug use and historically moral reformers and sensationalized media reports have served to "educate" Canadians about the area. In the early 1900s, both Chinatown and opium dens were constructed as racialized sites of immorality where White women and men were corrupted. Anglo-Saxon moral reformers and media reports claimed that Chinese men were luring innocent white girls into a life of addiction and sexual degradation (King, 1908). These unsupported claims (along with class concerns) led to the enactment of Canada's first federal "narcotic" legislation. Yet, illegal drug use and selling did not cease, and following World War II the number of drug convictions increased rapidly in Vancouver. The DTES was home to a large body of "hard living" single men who worked seasonally in isolated areas as loggers, fishers, and miners. Off season they lived in what was called "skid row" (Robertson & Culhane, 2005, p. 17). A "Special Committee on Narcotics" was set up to study the problem. The researchers identified the presence of a "drug addict colony" in the DTES. Their 1956 report, Drug Addiction in British Columbia: A Research Survey, recommended that drug maintenance programs not be established. Rather, abstinence programs and harsher penalties for drug traffickers were advocated (Stevenson et al., 1956). The 1956 report informed policy and practice in the DYES and the rest of Canada. Our failed drug (and social and economic) policy led to the DYES making headlines throughout the world in 1997 when a public health emergency was declared in response to the growing HIV, Hepatitis C and overdose death rates among drug users in the area. It made headlines again in 1999 when Vancouver's "missing and murdered women" finally became a public issue.
Today, about 16,000 people live in the DTES. It is a highly regulated space where media, law enforcement, social service and health providers, and researchers focus their gaze on visible drug use and illegal markets, infection and drug related health factors, perceived public disorder, commercial sex, single-room-occupancy (SRO) establishments, and bars. Visibility is directly related to poverty, lack of access to private space--affordable and stable housing--and neoliberal social policy. The DTES represents, in many ways, a struggle about space. Public disorder in the DTES was depicted as a major problem by the city of Vancouver in A Framework for action: A four-pillar approach to drug problems in Vancouver, in which recommendations to "regain space" were discussed (City of Vancouver, 2001). In 2001 the city of Vancouver recommended education/prevention, the development of harm reduction initiatives, expansion of drug treatment services, and an increased police presence to disrupt the open drug scene in the DTES. Even before Canada's Conservative government and Vancouver's Mayor Sam Sullivan were elected, it was clear that the enforcement pillar and the reduction of public "disorder" in the DTES was a top priority. Now with the 2010 Olympics nearing, the social factors that shape visibility in the DTES (including harm reduction initiatives) are increasingly ignored by both city and the federal governments while law-and-order initiatives are advanced. Thus, the DYES continues to be a highly regulated space, where "visible" bodies are regulated, condemned, and discriminated against. (2)
The H&H Project was constructed to tell a different story about the DYES and the women who live there. Culhane points out that professional and public discourse about the DTES obscures the "embodied nature of colonization" and how it impacts Aboriginal women who live and work there (Culhane, 2003). Drawing from earlier interviews for the H&H Project, Robertson and Culhane note that "the future of the DTES is uncertain" and the interviewed women's narratives "mark a moment in time and place" (2005, p. 19).
This paper examines the rewards and problematics of doing community-based research in the DTES from the viewpoints of the community-based researchers and the research assistants on the H&H Project. It examines how the research process, experiences, and goals of a project may differ depending on one's social location in and outside of the project. Further it highlights collaboration and tensions, especially about class, privilege, and ways of knowing, between faculty, RAs, and CBRs. The H&H project can be understood as space where collaboration occurred and where structural and personal relations, identities, and the replication of dominance prevailed. Reports about community-based research often ignore the varied and complex issues that may emerge, including the experience of community-based researchers and research assistants and space as a place of inquiry. In addition, the methodology for this research rarely offers suggestions or guidelines to follow. As one RA on the H&H Project noted:
I was reading [a paper by a researcher]. She did a community-based project. And I read through the report, and it was like, oh, it was so well done, and we hired community. And I just thought, you know, there's no way it wasn't uncomplicated and messy and all kinds of stuff was going on. And I thought she was doing an injustice to community-based research by not saying, "Look, this is a really difficult process, and this is what went on." Because I just thought--her report should have had more of a discussion. (Participant #3)
This paper explores how community-based research is multifaceted, providing a site for collaboration and emancipation and the replication of dominant practices. It also offers guidelines for community-based research.
Method
Critical researchers note that ethnographic methods and feminist methodology privilege the voices of women (Reinharz, 1992; Stanley & Wise, 1979; Oakley, 1990). Thus, in order to highlight the experiences of the CBRs and RAs who worked on the H&H Project, in the winter of 2002 and 2003 I conducted ten qualitative open-ended interviews with CBRs and RAs who had been involved in the H&H Project between 1999 and 2003. Participants were contacted by phone and e-mail. Everyone approached agreed to participate in the interviews. Although the sample often participants may not be fully representative of all the CBRs and RAs, it included more than half of the CBRs and RAs who participated in the H&H Project. The women interviewed were quite diverse in age, race/ethnicity, class, education, and research experience. The participants' ages ranged from women in their twenties to two senior citizens. The interviews were conducted in a range of locations in and outside the DTES, including the Carnegie Centre, restaurants, homes, university offices, and university classrooms. Similar to the stipend offered to women interviewed by the ethnographic team, all participants in the "community-based researchers project" were offered a stipend of $30 for their time. All...
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