Thursday, 24 January 2012

Diana Skelton, Deputy Director ATD Fourth World International, made a speech in the Colloquium “Extreme Poverty is Violence – Breaking the Silence – Searching for Peace”, explaining how ATD Fourth World’s innovative approach creates effective participatory action. She analysed the challenges of this method that pools the knowledge gained in resisting extreme poverty with other more traditionally recognised forms of knowledge. She further examined the importance of collective knowledge – the wisdom in crowds that can go further than what the individuals in the crowd would be able to figure out on their own – and underscored the importance of language, and of finding a common language between the different participants involved in this participatory-action research project.

“Although we have been preparing this colloquium for three years now, and we began meeting two days ago with the principal actors, this morning a crucial new part of the colloquium is just beginning with all of you who are joining us. In the world around us, communities and countries are increasingly convinced that the security of some can be provided by walls, borders and separations. The words “violence and poverty” are most often used together as an accusation, blaming some of the world’s harshest situations on those who have the least power. The weight of that blame and that stereotype has made it challenging to undertake this collective research together showing instead that it is extreme poverty itself that is violence. This knowledge about the violence of extreme poverty and about possible pathways toward peace have been at the heart of all our dialogues, and they will of course be the focus of our work today and tomorrow.

But before we begin, I’d like to speak about the ways we are developing this knowledge and understanding together. In our contract of common commitments in 2008, we spoke of “the challenge to merge different forms of knowledge: to recognize and take into account the knowledge gained in resisting poverty on equal footing with other forms of knowledge. … This kind of knowledge recognizes each person with dignity.” Although this is an approach we and others have been experimenting with for many years now, we know that it remains outside the mainstream of academia so we want to recognize how significant it is that all of you have made the commitment to being here and to working in this way.

Of course there are different currents in society exploring similar directions. Already in 1970, Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” called on educators to “treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge” instead of someone told to memorize passively. In his work on participatory action research, Freire felt that people who had been forced to remain silent in the past should become masters of questioning to help others understand the world better. But in the world of academic research, people living in extreme poverty have continued to be treated as statistics and as objects. Fr. Joseph Wresinski, in 1980, denounced this, saying:

“Scholars […] regard [them] as sources of information to be used for their own purposes. […] They have, to some extent, subordinated [people living in poverty] to their own exploration as outside observers. […] More seriously, these researchers have often, unintentionally and unwittingly, upset or even paralyzed the thinking of their interlocutors. This happened essentially because they did not recognize that they were dealing with a thinking that followed its own path and goals. […] Observation has convinced us that even the so-called participatory observation practiced by anthropologists and ethnologists runs the danger of misusing, tampering with, and paralyzing the thinking of the poor. This is so because it is an observation for a goal external to their life situation, one that they did not choose and which they would never have defined in the same way as the investigators. Consequently, the observation is not truly participatory since the thinking of the investigators and that of the population which is the object of their observation do not pursue the same goals.”

The most traditional forms of social science try rigorously to weed out bias. But when studies are consistently designed by one population to use on a very different population, all the conditions of research become biased. The very words chosen to question people may have quite different meanings to researchers and to people living in extreme poverty. In the years since that speech by Wresinski, there has been a rise in interest from policy makers and academics in qualitative testimonies from people living in poverty. But in the vast majority of cases, this interest is solely in a person’s first-hand experience—not in their thinking or analysis. In some cases, this interest reduces the words of people living in poverty to illustrations of other people’s theories or even of policies that are in fact very ill-adapted to the realities of extreme poverty. This, in itself, can be a form of violence: hearing only one part of what people have to say, and then turning it against them.

In all the work leading up to this colloquium, each of us has made the effort to go as far as possible in avoiding the approach of traditional academic research and instead in developing further the approach based on the merging of different sources of knowledge. From the beginning, our commitment was that none of us would be putting anyone else under a microscope, trying to analyse someone else’s experience or to interpret their words, saying, “Here’s what she meant by that…”.  Instead we have tried to formulate questions together, and to ask one another questions so that each of us is able to go further in articulating what we think about our personal experience. Even the word “we” is one we have thought about a great deal. It is a word to be cautious of because it can sometimes be used too quickly by a person who is wrongly assuming that others have similar experiences or agree with them. At the same time, because we have been working so closely together on questions as painful and personal as violence and the search for peace, this has led many of us to begin speaking with a “we” based on this shared commitment together, even when our personal experiences and the way each of us analyzes them may be different.

It is a “we” that is striving towards a new collective knowledge. The traditional western approach to knowledge has been an individual one based on competition: for grades, for professional recognition, for research grants. But collective knowledge is beginning to become one of the world’s natural resources as people crowdsource projects by drawing on the knowledge of as many contributors as possible via the internet. And more and more people recognize that there is a wisdom in crowds that can go further than what the individuals in the crowd would be able to figure out on their own. This collective approach to knowledge is something ATD Fourth World has been fostering in many ways, for instance in a pilot project for young people in Madagascar based on the pedagogy of non-abandonment. Young people with very little schooling were able to succeed at computer training and jobs because from the beginning they were motivated by the opposite of competition. They worked together to make sure that not one of them would fall behind or be left out, and as a group they found ways to succeed that brought them much further than any of them alone had been able to go.

We know that collective knowledge is an increasingly important natural resource for the world. But the conditions of extreme poverty, the very violence of extreme poverty, have prevented many people from developing their minds and contributing to the world’s collective knowledge. In that same speech in 1980, Wresinski spoke of how social science research itself often contributed to harming these people’s very search for identity:

“Those who think that human beings reduced to total poverty are apathetic and consequently don’t think, that they retreat into dependency or the simple struggle to survive day to day, make a serious mistake. They ignore the strategies of self defense that the poor create to escape the influence of those on whom they are dependent. […] To hinder the poorest by using them as informants rather than encouraging them to develop their own thinking as a genuinely autonomous act is to enslave them. All the more so because their thinking is almost always a search for their history and identity, and they alone have direct access to an essential part of the answers. They ask themselves questions about their history and identity, much more than about their needs or even their rights, because they know, perhaps confusedly but profoundly, that it is through these questions that they will find the path to freedom. We do not mean to say that it is always a mistake to speak to them about their rights or to question them about their needs. However, such an approach can be liberating for them only the extent that these exchanges take place within the perspective of their understanding of their historical identity, the only knowledge that can help them to be subjects and master of their rights and needs. […] To talk to them only of their needs, or of those “social indicators” which characterize them, without helping them to better understand their own history or the common traits of their lives is just another way of trapping them. […] The only identity the poor have is through what they need, what they lack. […] Is this right when we consider that their historical identity is one of immeasurable resilience and inalienable dignity? When we consider furthermore that it is an identity that carries an essential message to the whole society?”

During these three years of work on the violence of extreme poverty, it is by making sure that each person participating was able to go as far as possible in choosing their own words that this essential message has begun to take shape around the search for peace. One of the participants from the UK, Moraene Roberts, said how exhausting it is to always be fighting against violence, against poverty, against hunger. She said, “But to be told you can take the same voice, the same knowledge, the same emotion, and use it to speak for peace, is to be given a power I don’t think I’ve ever had before, in the same way. And to think I’m not having to fight against a government, against ‘them.’ What I can actually do is go to them in a peaceful way and say I’m bringing you something that you need to know in order to be able to provide for people like me in a humane way and a just way, in a decent way. And for us to be part of the solution, no longer part of the problem. It’s like I can go with a banner made of silk, whereas before I had one made of heavy wood.”
Now we are beginning the part of this colloquium with even more diverse sources of knowledge than before, all on equal footing and recognizing the dignity of each person. We’d like to thank all of you for taking part in this effort to build our collective knowledge in order to carry our essential message to society on a banner made of silk.”