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Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditionsDownloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 179186, 2002VIEWPOINTFootloose Researchers, Traveling Theories, and thePolitics of Transnational Feminist PraxisRICHA NAGAR, University of Minnesota, USAWhen feminist scholars from Western countries come here to do their research,they often try hard to do everything in our local language and idiom. But whyis it that when they return to their institutions, they frequently write in waysthat are totally inaccessible and irrelevant to us? The question of access isnot just about writing in English. It is about how one chooses to frame things,how one tells a story [Suppose] you tell my story in a way that makes nosense at the conceptual level to me or my community, why would we care whatyou have to say about my life? (Group discussion with three feminist scholaractivistsin Pune, India, July 27, 2000)In the last decade, re exivity, positionality and identity have become keywords infeminist . eldwork in much of anglophone academia. Indeed, it is now rare to . nd. eldwork-based feminist research that does not engage to some degree with the politicsof . eldwork, i.e. with a reexive analysis of how the production of ethnographicknowledge is shaped by the shifting contextual, and relational contours of the researcherssocial identity with respect to her subjects, and by her social situatedness orpositionality in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality and other axes of social difference(Nagar & Geiger, 2000, p. 2).Despite this proliferation of self-re exivity, however, feminist social scientists havelargely avoided the most vexing political questions that lie at the heart of our in/abilityto talk across worlds. The opening quotation vividly illustrates that at the most basic levelthese political questions have to do with the theoretical frameworks and languages thatwe deploy in our work. But the concern about the utility of theory and theoreticallanguages in transnational feminist praxis is entangled with at least three other complexissues. First is the question of accountability and the speci. c nature of our politicalcommitments: who are we writing for, how, and why? The second involves a seriousengagement with questions of collaboration: what does it mean to co-produce relevantknowledge across geographical, institutional, and/or cultural borders? Third, the concernentails an explicit interrogation of the structure of the academy and the constraintsand values embedded therein, as well as our desire and ability to challenge and reshapethose structures and values.Existing models of doing positionality and re exivity fail to engage adequately withthese issues. This inadequacy recently led Susan Geiger and me to argue that muchCorrespondence: Richa Nagar, Department of Womens Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455,USA; e-mail: nagar002@tc.umn.eduISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-052 4 online/02/020179-08 2002 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI 10.1080/0966396022013969 9179Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013180 R. Nagarimportant theoretical work on the concepts of re exivity, positionality and identity hasled to an impasse with respect to feminist research involving . eldwork (Nagar & Geiger,2000). This impasse is re ected, among other things, in the abandonment of . eldworkby some researchers in favor of textual analyses and in accusations by critics thatself-re exive exercises amount to mere navel gazing and serve either as tropes thatsound like apologies or as badges worn by researchers to prove their legitimacy (Patai,1991; Wolf, 1997). By identifying these problems, we do not dismiss the importance ofunderstanding how our situatedness as researchers and our multiple and shiftingcontextual identities and agendas shape the knowledges we produce. Rather, wemaintain that such re exivity does not go far enough in terms of political engagement,especially when it comes to feminist . eldwork in Third World contexts.In this viewpoint, I reframe and extend some of the arguments that Geiger and I makeabout the nature of this impasse by analyzing varying responses that I received in 2000to my manuscript, Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!) (subsequently published in Gender, Placeand Culture) from three very different feminist audiences. These audiences were locatedrespectively in the US academy and in two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) inIndiaone being a grass-roots organization of women in rural Bundelkhand (NorthIndia) and another a research and documentation center in the city of Pune (westernIndia). When juxtaposed and compared to each other, the three responses are instructivein not only rethinking issues of re exivity, positionality and identity in feminist . eldwork,but also in concretely identifying and grappling with some of the key challengesassociated with transnational feminist praxis. But before I discuss the responses, a fewwords about Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!) are in order.Mujhe Jawab Do: juggling multiple feminist agendasAfter eight years of research and writing on the gendered communal and racial politicsamong South Asians in Tanzania, I dramatically shifted the course of my intellectualjourney to North India and embarked on a new research project in Chitrakoot districtof Bundelkhand region (Uttar Pradesh) in 1998. The reasons for this shift were relatedto my own struggles with what constitutes politically relevant research, and I address thistopic at length elsewhere (Nagar & Geiger, 2000). For the purposes of my argument here,it should suf. ce to say that despite the theoretically and empirically exciting nature of mywork in Tanzania, the material, institutional, and ethical constraints associated with thisresearch seriously limited the spaces available to me for radical collaborative efforts withsocially marginalized Asian and Asian-African communities in Tanzania. These factorsled me to shift my next project to rural womens activism and social spaces in NorthIndia.One of the central goals of my new research was to examine the spatial tactics adoptedby rural women in Bundelkhand, often described as one of the most impoverished andviolence ridden areas in the country. Bundeli womens activism over issues of water andliteracy had made a big splash in Indian newspapers and I was eager to learn about thesestruggles, and about the way in which womens activism on the ground was shaped byinstitutions such as the Dutch Government, the World Bank, the Government of Indiaand state- and district-level governmental and non-governmental organizations.However, once I became immersed in the two grass-roots organizations working inthis area, activists from one of these organizations, Vanangana, made it clear that theywanted their emerging street theater on domestic violence to be a major part of myresearch inquiry. Accordingly, the . rst publication to come out of this research (Nagar,Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013Viewpoint 181CLICK HERE TO GET MORE ON THIS PAPER !!!2000) focused on charting the discursive geographies (the term is Gerry PrattsseePratt, 1999) of womens resistance through Vananganas street theater on domesticviolence. I explored the manner in which activists used a series of social spaces to developtheir political discourses for their own mobilization, and how they creatively used kinshipand gendered materialities of womens natal and conjugal villages to claim the maledominatedspaces of the community.The original version of the paper hinged on two main issues. First, it highlighted howrural womens activism on issues surrounding access to water and literacy led them tocritique an instrumentalist vision of empowerment in development organizations andhow they theorized and acted upon their understandings of the interconnections betweenempowerment, violence, space and politics. Second, it argued that feminist socialscientists located in the Western/Northern academy cannot choose to remain silent onmarginalized womens struggles concerning sensitive issues such as domestic violence inthe so-called Third-World simply because there is a messy politics of power andrepresentation involved in the . eldwork encounter. Rather, they should accept thechallenge of . guring out how to productively engage with and participate in mutuallybene. cial knowledge production about those struggles.Responses to the PaperOn . nishing the initial version of Mujhe Jawab Do! in March 2000, I sent off one set ofcopies to Gender, Place and Culture and another set to the two (and only) Vananganamembers who were uent in English. Later, when I visited India in July 2000, Ipresented the same paperin a mixture of Hindi and Englishto feminist scholar-activistsat Aalochana, a womens research and documentation center in Pune, Maharashtra.While the responses from all three audiences were quite positive and enthusiastic,each group emphasized very different things in relation to the politics of positionality,re exivity and identity.Response from Gender, Place and CultureTwo out of the three reviewers of GPC were disturbed because they assumed that myargument about the need for US-based feminist scholars to engage with sensitive topicssuch as domestic violence in the homes of rural women in India was coming from a whiteresearcher. They wanted to know why the author did not explain how s/he dealt withcultural and linguistic differences, and why s/he did not highlight the contributions ofIndian feminist scholars who were trying to engage in similar research endeavors. Bothreviewers suggested that I either say more about my personal background and positionality,or drop the argument about the need for US-based feminists to engage withmarginalized womens struggles in the Third World.Response from Vanangana, ChitrakootThe two English-speaking organizers at Vanangana expressed excitement about myin-depth ethnographic analysis of their street theater and said that it helped them thinkabout their political and spatial methodologies in a different light. However, they hadreservations about the theoretical section of the paper. While they understood how adiscussion of power and representation, and of relationships between US-based feministscholars and poor womens activism in the Third World could be important to otherDownloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013182 R. Nagar(academic) feminists, this subject was the least interesting or relevant for them. Thissection, they said, did not help them for two reasons.First, it was too theoretical and inaccessible for the members of their organization. Thereaders suggested that I eliminate the theoretical language and write a shorter version ofthe paper in Hindi so that women who were active in the street theater campaign couldread, re ect and respond to my analysis of their movement. Second, they wished to sharemy paper (in English) with other feminist organizations in the country and withprospective funding agencies because they themselves did not have the time or resourcesto produce such an analysis. They believed that the paper would serve this purpose muchbetter if I could substitute the section on representation with a more detailed discussionof the relationship between empowerment and violence in development thinking and inwomens social movements in South Asia.Response from Aalochana, Womens Research and Documentation Center, PuneWhen I presented the paper at Aalochana, an organization comprising feminist thinkerswho are active in womens development NGOs, its members responded with greatpassion and keen enthusiasm. Several of them expressed an interest in building directbridges with Vanangana members, in exchanging ideas, and discussing future collaborationsand strategies with them. Most women saw me as belonging to North India, anddid not raise any issues about whether I was an authentic enough researcher to undertakethe project. One scholar activist from New Delhi, however, who was the only otherNorth Indian in the room besides me, asked why American researchers like me did notleave such research projects for Indian feminists, and choose to do research on Indiancommunities living in the USA instead.Comparing the Responses: implications for transnational feminist praxisNone of the aforementioned groups questioned the relevance of the struggles that Inarrated and analyzed in Mujhe Jawab Do! Yet, the divergent nature of their responsesuncovered the messiness associated with attempts by feminists located in the Westernacademy to talk across worldsworlds that are separated not just socially, geopoliticallyand materially, but also in their understandings of what constitutes relevant theory andpolitics. Sorting through this mess necessarily implies making decisions regarding which/whose understandings about relevant theory matter the most to us and why.Interestingly enough, this messiness also vividly illustrates what Geiger and I label asthe impasse. For instance, the response from the two GPC reviewers exempli. ed thecentral problems that we identify with existing models of doing re exivity. First andforemost, re exivity in US academic writing has mainly focused on examining theCLICK HERE TO GET MORE ON THIS PAPER !!!identities of the individual researcher rather than on the ways in which those identitiesintersect with institutional, geopolitical and material aspects of their positionality. Thiskind of identity-based re exivity is problematic because it fails to distinguish systematicallyamong the ethical, ontological and epistemological aspects of . eldwork dilemmas.Consequently, the epistemological dilemma of whether/how it is possible to representaccurately often gets con ated with the issue of ethical relationships and choices, as wellas with the ontological question of whether there is a pre-de. ned reality (about researchersubject relationship) that can be known, represented, challenged or altered throughre exivity (Nagar & Geiger, 2000, p. 3). Last, but not least, a simple identity-basedDownloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013Viewpoint 183re exivity demands that we uncover ourselves in terms of certain categories or labels. AsSusan Geiger and I have argued:This demand needs to be challenged and resisted because uncovering ourselvesin these terms contradicts our purpose of problematizing the dominant meaningsattributed to pre-de. ned social categoriesthat is, social categories thatare not just essentialist or overly coherent, but a view of categories as existingprior to and isolated from speci. c interactions, rather than as created, enacted,transformed in and through those interactions. (Nagar & Geiger, 2000, p. 8)The response from the scholar-activist at Aalochana proves that the tendency to reducere exivity to simply an identity-based re exivity is by no means con. ned to the Westernacademic establishment. In raising questions about who constituted an authenticfeminist researcher, the aforementioned member of Aalochana was clearly reducingpositionality to the retrogressive kind of identity politics that allows only Xes to speakto X issues (di Leonardo & Lancaster, 1997, p. 5).It was the constructive criticism from the two Vanangana of. cials that I found to bethe most helpful for my project at hand, and to further grapple with the two key questionsthat lie at the heart of feminist research in Third World contexts:First, how can feminists use . eldwork to produce knowledges across multipledivides (of power, geopolitical and institutional locations and axes of difference)in ways that do not re ect or reinforce the interests, agendas and priorities ofthe more privileged groups and places? Second, how can the production ofthose knowledges be tied more explicitly to the material politics of socialchange in favor of the less privileged communities and places? (Nagar &Geiger, 2000, p. 2)Like Wendy Larners work on Maori and Pakeha women in New Zealand, Vananganascritique was based in an implicit recognition that in any given context there are likelyto be multiple situated knowledges rooted in different and often mutually irreconcilableepistemological positions (Larner, 1995, p. 187). The question that Vanangana membersposed, then, was neither Who was making the theoretical claims about power andrepresentation? nor What was the epistemological basis for those theoretical claims?but rather, What kinds of struggles did my analysis make possible for them? (paraphrasedfrom Larner, 1995, p. 187). In so doing, Vanangana of. cials circumvented theproblems of a simple identity-based re exivity that characterized the responses by theGPC reviewers and the critic from Aalochana. Instead, they articulated a more complexcritiquegrounded in a deeper political re exivitythat pushed me to rethink thesociopolitical implications of my theoretical framework, and how my choices regardingtheoretical languages were explicitly tied to questions of accountability and commitmentsin transnational feminist praxis.Let me give a quick example to highlight this key difference in the two kinds ofcritiques. One of the GPC reviewers (who had assumed that I was white and wanted meto say so) thought it was pretentious of me to claim that the problems surroundingaccurate representations of the subaltern should not deter feminist scholars from gettinginvolved in messy issues such as domestic violence in the lives of poor women in theThird World. The reviewer also expressed irritation that at one place, I used the termtalking to instead of talking with when elaborating on the need for feminist academicslocated here to seriously engage with theorizations of grass-roots activists there. Inorder to please this reviewer, then, all I would have had to do was to claim an authenticstatus as a real native from Uttar Pradesh, and use the correct lingo that replacedDownloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013184 R. Nagartalking to with talking with without changing my argument. Ironically, however, thesemodi. cations would have made no difference whatsoever to the usefulness of my analysisto Vanangana. In fact, it was precisely the abstract discussion of subalternity, representationand talking with/for/to that made it hard for my initial analysis to speak directlyto Vananganas concerns. The concrete practice of talking with the campaigners, however,led me to reorient my story away from what was fashionable in the academic realm oftheory, into the direction of the Bundeli womens political and intellectual priorities. Thisentailed eliminating the jargon about politics of representation and replacing it with ananalysis of the intersections among empowerment, violence, space and gender in SouthAsian development politics.Ultimately, however, our ability to talk across worldsto align our theoreticalpriorities with the concerns of marginalized communities whose struggles we want toadvanceis connected to the opportunities, constraints and values embedded in ouracademic institutions. In the concluding part of this viewpoint, I turn to this structuralissue and identify some of the key areas we need to reshape in order to createinstitutional spaces that can facilitate more productive dialogues among feminists locatedin materially, geographically, socially and politically diverse worlds.Academia, Theory, and Transnational Feminist Praxis: Some ConclusionsIf you ask me what is the object of my work, the object of the work is to alwaysreproduce the concrete in thoughtnot to generate another good theory, butto give a better-theorized account of concrete historical reality. This is not ananti-theoretical stance. I need theory in order to do this. But the goal is tounderstand the situation you started out with better than before. (Hall, 1988,pp. 6970) [1]Transnational feminist conversations, especially between worlds as far removed fromeach other as the ones I have described, cannot be productive unless feminist academicsbased in Western/Northern institutions produce research agendas and knowledges thatdo not merely address what is theoretically exciting or trendy here, but also what isconsidered politically imperative by the communities we work with or are committed toover there. By making this distinction between theory and politics I am not implying thatpeople who do theory are not engaged in political work, or that political activists arenot simultaneously engaged in important theory building. Rather, I am echoing themanner in which each group commonly states its priorities: for feminist academics inmajor research institutions in the USA, the primary concerns are often articulated interms of theory, while NGOs such as Vanangana or Aalochana are mainly interested inthe political and strategic rami. cations of a given concept or analysis. In other words,widening the notion of what constitutes theory should form the core of transnationalfeminist praxis. At a time when our students and colleagues are increasingly drawn to theelegance of high theory and the headiness of the abstract, we need to go back totheorists like Stuart Hall who remind us that concrete political engagement does nottranslate into an anti-theoretical stance.Equally, it is critical that such knowledge be produced and shared in theoreticallanguages that are simultaneously accessible and relevant to multiple audiences here andthere. While many academics accept the idea that working with NGOs or socialmovements requires producing written products other than scholarly books or articlesfor example, workshops, organizational reports, and newspaper articles in local lan-Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013Viewpoint 185guagesI believe that it is increasingly important for us to produce scholarly analyses thatcan be accessed, used and critiqued by our audiences in multiple geographical, social andinstitutional locations. This kind of scholarship is necessary not only to dismantle theexisting hierarchies of knowledge but also because, as we know so well, scholars in USresearch universities are often too overcommitted to devote much time to developingworkshops, organizational reports, or other non-academic products.At the same time, however, we must continue the struggle to create new institutionalspaces that favor, facilitate, and give due recognition to alternative research products andto new forms of collaboration. Workshops, organizational reports, or newspaper articlesin local/non-local languages that emerge from our work, for instance, must be institutionallyrecognizednot as extra-curricular activities that we do on the sidebut asresearch products that require special skills and time and energy commitments, and thatare central to scholarly knowledge production. Similarly, we must carry on . ghting forinstitutional recognition that knowledge is never produced by a single individual. Thisinvolves replacing the notion of sole authorship with one that genuinely recognizes andencourages collaboration with actors such as NGO workers, life-historians, and researchassistantsnot only in shaping the outcome of researchbut also in articulating andframing our research priorities and questions. In the context of research that focuses onfeminist organizing at the grass-roots level, it is also important to consider how womensgroups are building alliances with men and the ways in which male research assistantsand co-researchers can play a critical role in yielding insights about activism, gender andspace, particularly in gender-segregated social contexts.Finally, I would like to draw upon Cindi Katzs notion of translocal countertopographiesthat link different places analytically and thereby enhance struggles in the name ofcommon interests (Katz, 2001, p. 1230). For transnational feminist research to producesuch countertopographies, researchers must seriously consider how we can serve asuseful channels of communication between scholars and activists located in differentplaces who are not as mobile as we are. For example, organizations working onenvironmental issues and economic policies in India want to know about how localorganizations coordinated and developed their strategies during the World TradeOrganization protest in Seattle. Similarly, womens organizations in Pune want to . ndout how they can build bridges with womens organizations in Bundelkhand. Andfeminist researchers working in New Delhi want to know how they can link up withfeminists working on similar issues in Dar es Salaam and Cape Town. Combining thisconcern in our own re exive process can help us use our locational, material andinstitutional privileges to develop more politically effective feminist research strategies inthe context of globalization.AcknowledgementsI dedicate this essay to the memory of Susan Geiger, who never got a chance to readthis piece, but who instilled in me the passion and inspiration for the issues I raise here.Discussions with David Faust, Naomi Scheman, and Mary Jo Maynes, and commentsfrom an anonymous reviewer were critical in helping me articulate several of the pointsI make here about re exivity, political engagement, collaborative knowledge, andrelevant theory, and I thank them for generously sharing their time and ideas with me.Last but not least, I am grateful to Lynn Staeheli for her interest, encouragement, andvision, for her excellent feedback on an earlier version of this article, and for making thisviewpoints section happen.Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)] at 14:12 09 July 2013186 R. NagarNOTE[1] I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this quotation by Stuart Hall to me. The revieweralso adds (a` la Marx), and I agree completely, that after understanding the situation you started out withbetter than before, the goal is to change that situation.REFERENCESDI LEONARDO, MICAELA & LANCASTER, ROGER N. (1997) Introduction: embodied meanings, carnal practices,in: ROGER N. 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