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Article Excerpt
Pretty Normal Day
There's cat litter on the kitchen floor a roller skate next to a fingerprinted door, crumpled cornflake crumbs in the video player, and a suspect yellow puddle right near the potty. I can't put used cups in the sink because it's full of last night's dishes, unwashed. She's screaming in my arms, he's scaling the stereo, chasing the cat up high and down low. He bumps his head on the reading lamp and we all sit there, my hair curly and damp from our tears.
Sure Start Parent
THIS ARTICLE LOOKS AT HOW THE ARTS CAN BE EMPLOYED IN PARTICIPATORY SOCIAL research with poor working-class women as an innovative approach to collecting data as well as a powerful means of disseminating research findings. It questions traditional means of knowledge production and suggests that the use of art in this context challenges many of the assumptions inherent in sociological inquiry.
In so doing, the article reflects on a research project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, carried out at a Sure Start program in Merseyside, in the United Kingdom (U.K.). Sure Start, announced in 1998, is a government-funded initiative that works with families and their young children in some of the most deprived areas of the U.K. It claims to enable greater access to a variety of health, social, and educational services, and appears on the surface to confront forms of social exclusion. Emphasis is on collaboration among these services to help reduce inequalities and, ultimately, to end child poverty.
This Sure Start program is situated in a socially and economically deprived ward of North West England; it is a run-down, ex-mining community that has known longstanding high rates of unemployment, resulting in extreme poverty and social exclusion. The research project involved recruiting and training a team of poor, working-class women--all mothers of young children attending the Sure Start program--to carry out research on their own community. They have been involved in each aspect of the project, from designing the questions to collecting data, analyzing results, and disseminating the findings.
The research focuses predominantly on the experiences of families living in the area and on raising children there, and questions how the Sure Start initiative has affected their lives (if at all). Our research team (including five recruited women and myself) was keen to employ a range of methods to construct a multifaceted picture of these families. Important to the project was the inclusion of emotional, even spiritual, experiences, which would capture some of the essence of life itself. It sought to provide an antidote to the increasingly rigid, target-driven approach favored by Britain's New Labour government which, by focusing on numbers and narrowly defined outcomes, fails to take into account the complexity of people's lived experiences (Jordan and Jordan, 2000).
The Sure Start program targeted in the research already had a history of community arts. Many local women were very enthusiastic about taking part in the research project. Drawing upon a host of local resources and making contact with local arts practitioners, poets, artists, and actors, I set up creative writing, short-film making, visual arts, and drama groups, open to anyone in the local community to attend. Thus, beyond the more conventional methods of data collection (questionnaire interviews and in-depth qualitative interviews), though carried out by local women, many parts of the local community could become engaged in arts activities through the project. This produced authentic research findings, while offering the participants a chance to develop new skills and maintain an element of control in expressing their experiences and feelings.
Pretty Normal Day, the poem that opens this article, was written by a Sure Start parent during the research. Its description of a domestic scene encapsulates several of the project's themes, which will be more thoroughly addressed below. The poet is a young woman who, as a teenage parent, experienced a great deal of stigma from the health and education services. She had also experienced postnatal depression (as had a remarkable number of the women we spoke to during the course of the research) and her poem helps to paint an intimate picture of the frustrations of motherhood. It introduces the feminist notions of emotion in research and alternative ways of knowing, to be discussed in section one of this article. Also demonstrated is the ability of arts-based methods to generate valid data, the subject of section two.
The poem further shows how, beyond being a vehicle for the production of rich, evocative data, the arts can provide a fruitful means of disseminating such data. This is explored in section three. Because I trained in Fine Art before moving into the social sciences and have a passion for literature, much of the social science literature I have come across has been disappointing; writings about people and the world we live in fail somehow to capture the very stuff of life. Jack (2005) shares this dissatisfaction with social scientific writing; he likens it to "seeing the world through half-closed Venetian blinds, or feeling it through rubber gloves." I argue that through poetry readings, displays of artwork, short-films and dramatic performances, research data are brought vividly to life.
The article concludes by looking at alternative ways of evaluating the validity of such alternative approaches to research. I argue that employing a participatory, arts-based methodology when researching issues of poverty and inequality is particularly pertinent in the current policy climate.
Feminist Participatory Inquiry
What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the narrowest perimeters of change are possible and allowable (Lorde, cited in Bhattacharyya, 1998: 43).
Participatory research is, as Hall (2001: 171) asserts, "an integrated three-pronged process of social investigation, education, and action designed to support those with less power in their organizational or community settings." A democratic and transformative approach, its goals include building skills with, and giving voice to, those involved in the research process (hence improving the lives of individuals), ameliorating communities, and, ultimately,...
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