Reflection or Deflection: Concluding thoughts on the research process & social justice

As my involvement in this research project comes a close, I keep asking myself “What next?” How can I use my experiences and increased understandings of the tangled nature of privilege and privileging dynamics to take action in the future? What does that look like? What problems and contradictions would future steps incur? These questions are very related to the focus of the readings and discussion for our last class of the semester: dilemmas regarding social justice efforts by privileged individuals. Acknowledging one’s privilege and its relational contingency on others’ oppression is an important step, but when this self-reflexivity is used to position oneself as better than privileged individuals, one may just be shifting the metrics of elite status to look more progressive.

Is self-reflecting then a deflection the problem of privilege away from the self and onto others? I think this can be an unintended side-effect, but not a necessary one. On the other side, for example, while I recognize the importance of the language we use and its symbolic power on social relations, I don’t think that calling community service “civic engagement” really changes anything if the types of activities and that constitute civic engagement have stayed the same. For a word to have an impact, those being asked to change their terminology need to understand why it matters to do so and how word choice affects lived experiences. Then they also need to adopt those changed meanings in how they approach the topic. This example is a little tangential, but I think it serves as an important parallel to my point that changing an individual’s disposition doesn’t always change their actions. The question then is how do we better connect or dually promote thought and action together, specifically in an educational sphere.

Sometimes academic work can feel very limited in the scope of its importance, particularly when its audience is limited to members of specific course taken during a specific semester with a specific group of people. Even though the question of “So what?” is central to writing a research paper and coming up with a rationale, its answer can still feel unreachable on a practical level that is removed from an academic sphere.

And the desire for there to be some way to apply research and “do good” in the world has implications in the reproduction of privilege, as many of our readings this semester have touched upon. This impulse relates back to the sense of “moral responsibility” that elite individuals embody and sub/consciously employ to consecrate their elite status. Even knowing this, and how social justice efforts undertaken by privileged individuals may even serve to fortify instead of dissolve social inequities, doing nothing still feels wrong to me.

Locating the mechanisms that allow for genuine social change—not just a change in the outward presentation of status groups—is hard to do because no action seems sufficient unless it is overthrowing the entire structure. There’s this worry in me that by highlighting large-scale upheaval as being the only means of alleviating social inequities completely than therefore the end goal will feel too unreachable to ever do anything towards. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t work towards a more equitable structure, but that there are concrete things we can do on a local/individual level that can help. Of course, now I’m cycling back to my previous concern that I only think this way because I feel a moral responsibility to use (and thus validate) my privilege.

When I started off writing this post, I meant to think a lot more concretely about types of social justice efforts and their intended and unintended consequences, but I’ve ended up writing an abstract call to be less abstract and more grounded in discussions of social justice. To be cyclical one final time, it’s hard to practice what you preach, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice anything at all—nor does it mean that we shouldn’t think critically about how our attempts to enact social justice might be subversive to that very goal.