Brinton Lykes. Combining academic and more engaged work.

Professor Brinton Lykes

Hilary: Hello Professor Lykes, Brinton! I’ve known of you and your work for over 30 years. How can it be that we are only meeting now. I have found you to be a role model in combining academic and engaged work. You’ve been a path builder with that. You’ve also been way out in front with creative methods for engaging participants. And as you know you’re one of our go-to reviewers at ARJ when we need expertise on the critical use of photovoice. Thank you for all that! It’s a pleasure to reconnect because of your new book, Beyond Repair? with Alison Crosby, which we see has just won an  honorable mention from the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Congratulations!

I’d like to start our conversation, if I may, with what’s top of mind for you when you consider your scholarly-activist journey that successfully combined academic and deep practice that is the heart of action researching.

Brinton: Wonderful to be in conversation with you, Hilary. Thank you for making it possible.

I might start with my experiences growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana. As a child, I remember signs that enforced racial segregation, whites at one drinking fountain and “colored,” at another. And through Catholic schooling I was introduced to some of the economic and racial inequities in life. And, I sort of grabbed onto that in a rather conventional way as a child, based on my own class and racialized privileges, with notions of “charity,” or, at best, “social responsibility,” so school always involved taking some actions, doing some things to redress inequities or share what I had… and early introduction to thinking and doing but more as a volunteer. Those experiences, that combination, was sustained, over multiple years through university and then to Harvard Divinity School for graduate studies. But what I began increasingly to understand, in part through studies in 1968 in Paris when students and workers shut down the city through their social movement and at Harvard through liberation theology and feminist theology was a shift from charity to change, or a more intentional approach focused on the need to organize for route social change. And I think those experiences contributed to transforming my agenda from that in my childhood to something that was closer to engagement in transformative activism rooted in scholarship.

Hilary: Were you thinking theoretically too?

Brinton: I began to understand something about Marxism and something about radical social change and movement organizing. And when I was at Harvard Divinity School, I encountered for the first time my own experience of being marginalized or minoritized as a woman. I had always seen myself and experienced myself as more privileged, both in terms of my access to education, the socioeconomic status in my family, and also as being white. But at Harvard Divinity School, I was one of a very small number of women studying for a MDiv and many assumed that the few women that were there were there to find husbands rather than to seriously engage in a serious intellectual pursuit and preparing for jobs in social justice or social change. There I was introduced to the women’s movement and participated in a socialist-feminist reading reflection group and was engaged in several local NGOs. And, to make a long story short, after years of collaborating with local women’s organizations in Boston and completing my MDiv and coordinating women’s studies programs at Harvard for a few years, I realized that if I wanted to work in academic environment in teaching that was grounded in transformative practice in the community, I needed to do a doctorate.

Hilary: Women’s transformation work seems focal in your efforts?

Brinton: I was very interested in what factors facilitated women understanding their oppression and/or marginalization as something about themselves and as due to their own frailties or our own limitations and what helped us to see these challenges, problems, or violence as due to systemic and structural issues. This understanding of women’s oppression was deeply informed by the Combahee Women’s Collective in Boston at the time, thinking about what today we describe as the intersections of gender, race and social class issues. So I began a PhD in a program at the interface of sociology and psychology, that at the time was called Psychology and Social Structure – where several of the core faculty were community psychologists. And I think that’s really been those early commitments and the understanding of the world that developed during those years, deeply informed by other protests movements in addition to the women’s movement including against the US government’s role in Vietnam and then in Central America, have shaped my intellectual, social, political, and personal life. And by deciding to take a position at a university, and landing in one like Boston College and has a professed commitment to social justice, I feel like I opted to take a position in the grayness of life where there is an ideology and a discourse of commitment to justice and social change. But there’s a practice that is often very tied to conventional processes, whether it’s in research that is predominantly positivist or whether it’s in pedagogies lecturers wherein students learn dominant neo-colonial, neoliberal theories and research that sustains the status quo – and are all too often expected to parrot back to professors rather than critically engage ideas from the ground of their own experiences.

Hilary: I wonder has that changed in mainstream academia?

Brinton: I might say that although I am “on the margins” of that dominant, mainstream, I experience myself to have moved into the gray zones of life in order to sustain my job in the mainstream, while continuing to sustain my research and activism on the boundaries or outside of that mainstream. On the one hand, I think I lost a little bit of the edge of some of the more strongly held views or radicalism and the strong belief I had that I was going to experience revolutionary change in my lifetime. But I think also in the process of getting that PhD, I had an opportunity to spend some time in Central America and that experience has deeply informed my life journey as an activist researcher.

Hilary: Your on the ground experience informed you?

Brinton: Absolutely. In some ways my engagement in Guatemala began in Nicaragua, a trip in which I sought to better understand something about the revolutionary changes there in the early 1980s when the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. And there I met a group of Mayan peasants who were fleeing massacres in their home villages. I had been doing a lot of solidarity work with Central Americans, protesting US funding of the military in El Salvador, of the Contras in Nicaragua, but I had no idea what was going on in Guatemala. And I was stunned and, and humbled by my lack of knowledge. If somebody had told me it was going on in central Africa and I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t have been as surprised because I didn’t know much about central Africa at that moment in my life. But knowing about various struggles in Central America, I was, the only explanation I could come up with to explain to myself why I didn’t know about what was happening in Guatemala was because it was racism. They were killing indigenous peoples and it was being overlooked or even ignored.

The government, the military, was killing Brown people, Native, Indigenous communities, and not only was the country denying it, but the world was ignoring it or denying it, as if it wasn’t happening. While in Nicaragua I met several other Guatemalan women, who asked some of us from the US to organize a tour of Guatemalan women to the United States to ask women there to protest the US government’s funding to the massacres; which I thought was a rather extraordinary request. And perhaps more extraordinary was for me to even think of doing it, ‘cuz I knew nothing about Guatemala and about the women who were asking us to do this. But there was a moment in which that request converged with my history of anti-racism work in the US, my upbringing as a white woman in the South of the US in the midst of segregation and what I had increasingly learned to be systemic racism, and my growing sense that revolutionary change was a long term goal, a lifetime process, not something that would come in my youth… or perhaps not in my lifetime. And one of the women with the group I was in offered to contribute $1,000 to support the tour and I had been coordinating women’s programs and knew lots of folks involved in that work so I thought I could contribute to making this happen, so I agreed to do it.

Hilary: Was that a lot of money then?

Brinton: Yeah. A lot of money. So, I said, sure. And I picked up the phone when I got back to Boston – you know, of course, that there was no internet then. And I called up a group in Washington, the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala, and I made one of my most longstanding friendships with the woman who answered the phone on the other end who very generously offered “to help” and NISGUA became a key co-sponsor of the tour. I not only learned an enormous amount, about organizing, including how to get visas for a Mayan peasant and a young psychology student – and things like that. But that experience – and the convergence of what these women spoke about vis-à-vis their understanding of themselves, of their lives, the war, etc. and my PhD dissertation on assumptions of individualism in US psychology of the self – contributed to my spending the next few summers in Mexico working with Guatemalan refugees. While there, I backed into action research and what has become the place where I’ve planted my feet and built my understanding of who I am in the world and what it means to act and then to critically reflect on those actions, walking alongside Mayan women refugees and then in rural Guatemala, and then to act again in ways that facilitate what Mary Watkins called “psychosocial accompaniment” and is now calling “mutual accompaniment,” speaking of those of us who do research and action within and across multiple axes of power and privilege.

Hilary: What did the people, your stakeholders, the Maya want from you?

Brinton: It was a group of Mayan refugees, well, actually Guatemalan refugees including academics and some rural peasants from multiple organizations in the countryside. They wanted me to document stories of women who were living in Mexico to facilitate their development of popular educational resources for organizing among refugee communities. And I was interested in documenting these stories from a very elite, intellectual question that was grounded in my dissertation, which as I just mentioned was focused on a critique of the assumptions of individualism in Western psychology. And I, as I listened to the women who came to the US on that tour I had organized, their understandings of themselves, their families and their communities clashed with US psychological notions of individuality and self. And I realized: Oh my goodness, you are people whose lives reflect what I’ve been theorizing about and I need to know more about you and your lived experiences and how you make meaning of yourself and your lives. So, I was interested in that and those who invited me to work with them in Mexico were interested in developing popular education manuals for organizing peasants. And I agreed to do interviews and documented women’s stories. And when I got back to the U S, well, it’s a longer process, but I realized I couldn’t publish any of those stories because they narrated lives of refugees who were at risk given their or their family’s political participation in Guatemala, and publishing their stories at that time could have put them more at risk.

Hilary: Did this become your PhD thesis in psychology then?

Brinton: I had finished my dissertation but I wondered how to build on it, drawing on these experiences. I had just taken an academic teaching job. And I thought: Oh, I’ve just spent the last six months of my life doing research that can’t contribute to any publications. I recall somebody inviting me to write a chapter for a book she was editing. And I said: I don’t have anything to write about – and I explained to her why and she encouraged me to write about the research process itself, the methodology. And I realized that I had much to say about the informed consent process. Meanwhile, the anthropologists that I was meeting at the state college in Rhode Island where I was teaching, kept saying to me, “those interviews are great, how did you get these women to share with you in this way? “ Even though I could not write up the stories, I did share the experience in colloquia on campus. And I was trying to figure it out myself. I couldn’t understand, you know, why they were so surprised as I had not realized the uniqueness of the dialogue we had generated. And slowly I began to realize the particularity of these collaborations, unique partnerships that I had been able to develop as they had evolved through shared actions, through what Paul Farmer later called “pragmatic solidarity”. That is, I was standing with them as they shared with me who they were and how they and their families and communities were taking actions on behalf of their people – in a context of horrific violence and armed struggle.

Hilary: What we now would call “relationality.” At AR+ we call it creating relational space.

Brinton: Really it is about “dialogic relationality.” And what I ended up writing about from that summer was informed consent and the ethics of research in such a context – and about how my coming into that situation or relationship from a position of power and influence as a university professor, I had developed a critique of the conventional informed consent form and process, thinking that I was being a so-called “responsible researcher,” but I had failed to understand the power that people that I was interviewing have. So, I would for example, ask these women to sign these pieces of paper giving me permission to interview them and to record the interview. And they would say no. And I would first worry that we were not communicating well due to my limited Spanish and their being second language Spanish speakers – and then once I realized that that was not the issue I would seek to convince them to sign by assuring them that their signatures were confidential; that nobody else would see that or the interviews, etc. And they would continue to refuse, insisting that they were not talking to me because of a piece of paper or a written agreement. Rather, they insisted, that they were talking to me because so-and-so had introduced me to them and had told them about my lived experiences in solidarity with Guatemala prior to our meeting. Once I understood their positionalities, they agree to sign the informed consent forms, noting they changed their names regularly. And through these exchanges I began to better understand their realities, their lived experiences, and how power circulated in this relationship and what it meant to slowly create what Patricia Maguire spoke about in terms of the possibilities and limits on trust in her early PAR with Native Americans in the US southwest who had survived domestic violence. I ended up having this great sort of “aha experience” and began to develop different kinds of understandings of power, ones that now I might say recognize “power over” but also are focused on the diverse circulations of power due to racism, gendered violence, colonialism, neoliberal capital – and the persistent protagonism of those traditionally marginalized or minoritized – and how that persistence expresses itself through their collective organizing and/or self-empowerment.

Hilary: Guatemala was dangerous. Did you feel responsibility to those relationships?

Brinton: I made relationships there that have endured. And it was several of the women I interviewed in Mexico who asked me to go to Guatemala. Frankly, I would have never gone into an armed conflict, which was going on in Guatemala at the time, had it not been from meeting people who asked me to do things that made sense at the time. By then I had been teaching at the state college in Rhode Island for a number of years and was living in community in Boston, commuting to Rhode Island and teaching, among other things, community psychology and psychology of race and gender. And spending summers and semesters off in Guatemala working with a rural health organization, focusing on mental health resources in war zones and training rural peasants in work with children. I was enjoying each experience but also recognizing contradictions and challenges in coordinating each of these commitments and balancing the diverse responsibilities.

Hilary: Back when you started out we hear that academia was even pleasant. It allowed faculty members to be creative. Was that true for you?

Brinton: I was very lucky. I started out in a university which didn’t have a strong research trajectory, but it had a brand-new president who wanted to support faculty doing research and publishing. She was a psychologist, too, so my work came to her attention as did that of other psychologists in the university. And I was in a faculty where the pay was so miserable that many my colleagues had two jobs with limited time for research as our teaching load was a 4-4. And I was one of the few people who was very interested in doing more research. And the president didn’t seem to care what kind of research we did, that is, whether it was traditional positivist psychology or PAR. I think if I had started in a place such as Boston College where the pressures are to get external funding and publish in specific journals that are highly ranked, I would have had a very different journey in the academy.

Hilary. I look forward to the necessary and likely impending transformation of scholarship and universities. Today the imperative has devolved into “publish in journals with high impact factors.” 

Brinton:The President of RIC gave me an internal grant of $1,000 to go to Mexico for the summer to do the work I described above; and then, another $1000 internal grant with which I went to Guatemala for a semester on a pre-tenure leave. And when I was on campus I was teaching four courses each semester. Long story short, I did begin to do more participatory and feminist, transnational, action research and to publish and the more I published, the more interested people in psychology were in hearing about what I was doing but not in hiring me to do it! After a few years I moved to Boston College School of Education and Human Development, with a much-reduced teaching load and a salary increase. And interestingly enough, I landed in an applied psychology and human development program in which nobody was interested in teaching undergraduates. But they needed somebody to organize an undergraduate program, so that is what I did.

Hilary: Action researchers have to be good organizers, don’t they?

Brinton: Yes, and by then I was an organizer. Actually, the first thing I did at Boston College was to organize a joint program between the School of Management and the School of Education because Bill Torbert was teaching Action Inquiry and Jean Bartunek had written the SAGE handbook on insider-outsider action research and I found I had much in common with folks there.

Hilary: People may not realize what a hotbed of innovation my My old Alma Mater’s organization development department was. Our PhD program was named “Organization Change and Transformation.” I loved it.

Brinton: Right. All of a sudden, I who had no interest in business or management discovered that the people I had most in common at the university at that time were in the school of management. There were also PhD students in applied and educational psychology in the school of education who were older students and who had returned to school and were very interested in learning how to do participatory and action research with schools and local communities. And they pushed me to create a course in participatory action research. I’ve had sort of a little niche doing community and cultural and critical psychology and feminist and anti-racists participatory and action research in a psychology department in a school of education.

Hilary: Let’s pivot the conversation more into the details of action researching. I am interested that you were an early adopter – teaching about consent, power sharing, your own developmental reflexivity in researching with people who are not as verbally or educationally adept as you. I’m thinking of your work in Nicaragua, Guatemala, South Africa and Northern Ireland. Perhaps a rich example comes to mind?

Brinton: I learned about photovoice through a mentor of mine, Abby Stewart, who had moved from BU to the University of Michigan and she was a good friend of Caroline Wang’s [originator of photovoice]. At that point in my journey, I had been spending multiple semesters and summers in Guatemala and working with a community-based health organization and doing what I called creative workshops for health promoters working with children. I engaged the arts, including theater, individual and collective drawing, collages with these promoters to help them develop skills for working with kids. Mayan villages had been decimated by massacres and the health program wanted to help their health workers develop mental health resources for working with kids so that the children who had witnessed such horrors and lost their parents could begin to be able to understand what was going on in the country and what the political and social implications of the armed conflict that had endured almost four generations might be on kids being raised in armed conflict and in the post-genocide processes that were unfolding.

Hilary: Such difficult contexts, so much suffering.

Brinton: I had done a number of training modules with this health organization, ASECSA, and their community- based health promoters. Initially almost all men, which was odd because men did not work with children in general in Guatemala at that time. But that was the safest way to introduce some of this work that ASECSA hoped to do while the armed conflict persisted. And it was in that period of time that they pushed me to make a training video for them to have to use when I was not there. And a friend of mine who is as film maker actually helped make a little video on creative techniques as resources for work with those directly affected in contexts of armed conflict and humanitarian disasters. And in that context, I was increasingly aware of, and, and connected to – including having had the opportunity to spend six months in Argentina working with psychologists and other mental health works who had been working the arts and creativity with the children of the disappeared. There I received training at a school developed by psychiatrist/actor/playwright, Eduardo Pavlovsky, in psychoanalytic psychodrama.

Hilary: Is there some relation to Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and also Jakob Moreno’s work on psychodrama?

Brinton: Yes, that work was influenced by Moreno and my work drew on his earlier work and then that of Augusto Boal. That decision to work and study in Argentina was motivated by my desire to engage in collaborative work with others, but it was also a strategy for me to begin to deal with some of the psychological, social and political effects I was experiencing as I had been listening to the horrors that people – and especially children – were telling me about in the years that I had been in with survivors of massacres in Mexico and in the countryside of Guatemala.
And realizing that when I would come back to the university and sit in my home in Boston, typing up transcripts from these interviews, I would either dissolve into tears or I would throw things in a rage as I couldn’t manage my own responses and reactions to these experiences. So, the opportunity to train with others whose political understanding of the underlying causes of these armed conflicts and dictatorships I shared and who were doing work related to the work I was doing in Guatemala was critically important for me.

Hilary: I’m wondering about self-care. You also had to take care of yourself so that you could remain helpful to others, right?

Brinton: Yes, it was for those two reasons – my own training and collaborations with other psychologists engaged in this work and deeply informed by their political activism – that I spent that time in Argentina. And it’s been, it’s been a godsend; it not only contributed to my own well-being but it informed my understanding of how one does participatory and action research through engaging with the arts and creativity, that is, with embodied practices that facilitate performances of self that draw on multiple dimensions of life, that don’t take place exclusively or even primarily through orality, but through our bodies that holds so much of the social suffering and pain that we have endured. And those performances informed by creative techniques and resources are critical for facilitating processes through which to rethread community, to retell one’s own and one’s community’s story.

Hilary: We are so steeped in wordiness in psychology and indeed all of scholarship. And we wonder why there is so little impact. That’s part of what needs to be transformed in how we do scholarship.

Brinton: In the university, we’re so tied to the spoken word and then, the written word. And so many communities do not live their lives that way. And in addition, more recently I have been working with women who are from Mayan communities who speak different indigenous languages and they cannot always communicate with each other and they certainly cannot always communicate with me or other Latina professionals with whom we have been working.

So, in meeting Caroline Wang, and learning of her project in rural China I added to my previous work with theater and drawing, enhancing resources that would eventually be very useful for longterm work in Guatemala with rural Mayan women – and, more recently, in post-Katrina New Orleans with Latina and African American health promoters or in the Southern Quiché of Guatemala with children “left behind” when their parents were forced to migrate north to the U.S.

But, back to my work in Guatemala. When I first arrived in Guatemala, in the mid-1980s, while the war was still ongoing, it was ridiculous for someone who’s tall and white like me to be living in or hanging out in rural Indigenous communities; it was more a risk for them than for me. But, later, in the mid- to late- 1990s, as the peace accords were being negotiated between the government and the URNG [Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity], I was once again asked by a Mayan woman to respond to what she saw as a need that she felt I could respond to. She asked me: “Why don’t you go up there [to Chajul] and help these women?

Hilary: Aha, You were volunteered.

Brinton: Yes, she suggested I go and I answered, once again, yes. This time I felt as if I knew much more about Guatemala than when the first Guatemala women I had met in Nicaragua asked me to organize a tour for Guatemalan women to come to the U.S. but I knew little about the remote town in the northern Quiché in the Guatemala Highlands where she was sending me. And it was there that I began to learn more about listening from zero, about what Raimón Panikkar, the Indian-Spanish philosopher-theologian with whom I had studied at Harvard meant when he talked about understanding requiring that we “stand under” the experiences of those who lives are significantly different from our own. Over time I learned why rural Mayan women who had survived genocidal violence and were living in extreme poverty think that building a corn mill is a mental health project.

Hilary: A kind of relearning health through collective action?


Brinton: Yes, and learning through living amongst them. They were a small group, women who had returned from Mexico, Guatemala City, and beyond, and those who survived being hidden under beds and in the eaves of the roofs of their homes to escape soldiers who repeatedly raped women. And they wanted to build a better life for their children. So, I was able to respond by seeking resources from what I had learned in Mexico, in Argentina, and beyond, and to do what they wanted me to do – and more. By that point I had tenure in the university and had also served in a variety of administrative positions – and was able to take a year sabbatical that gave me more time in Chajul. And being there upturned my thinking about psychology, about many of the theories I had learned. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was flipped on its head living with these rural women and their families. And, and through working with them as they decided that they wanted to do things that women in their community had never done them before, I agreed to help them. But when they tried, for example, to build a building that would hold a corn mill that they would run to grind corn for their tortillas, they got frightened. And as they got frightened, I offered to facilitate creative workshops and they would dramatize their fears. And then as they dramatized their fears, while others watched, and reacted, and then multiplied the dramatizations, performing both new and old fears, over time they would dramatize stories of the war, things that had happened to them and to their families, things about which they had not wanted to talk about with me when I first went up there or with the official truth commissions that sought their testimonies. Through this and other similar experiences I learned first-hand that what the Italian pedagogue, Gianni Rodari, had once said, that is, that you can enter the house through a window rather than the door – and it’s sometimes a lot more fun, is true.

I did a lot of entering spaces through windows.

Hilary: What a marvelous metaphor.  Entering spaces through windows.

Brinton: I was working alongside these women as they undertook building a women’s organization, doing economic development projects, and then starting an after school project for the town’s children, many of whose parents could not afford the shoes or notebooks to send their children to school. We also had multiple spaces and times for creative workshops that offered problem-solving spaces but that also – and for some, perhaps primarily, provided accompaniment and psychosocial assistance. What I now understand more because I’ve been interviewing some of the 18 still living Maya with whom we did the photoPAR process in the late 1990s in hopes of writing a book about my 30 years of engaging in a range of participatory and action research processes with the same community, and that I had not realized at the time, is the incredible impact these creative workshops had, particularly on the younger Maya, women in their twenties and thirties at the time.

Hilary: I’m also picking up the idea that there’s tremendous anxiety that often needs to be resolved before people can really get clear on what they’re up to. Let’s pivot to close our conversation. What do you see when you look to the future of action research, next generation action research. What do you see for others following behind on paths you help create?

Brinton: I think that I have learned an enormous amount from having had the privilege to accompany Mayan women, Indigenous peoples. I would say I’m a definitely a latecomer to the critical importance of the earth and environmental justice issues – and all that the earth has offered us – and the ways in which we have as human beings have expropriated and appropriated rather than nurtured these gifts and turned the earth into property as opposed to recognizing our place within the natural world. The Mayan women with whom I’ve worked have also introduced me to some of their knowledge systems, the spirituality that they have preserved and continue to reinterpret and practice in their daily lives, in ways that I have come to deeply appreciate. Also, I’ve been able to reconnect to some of that spiritual self- and other-understanding in my own upbringing. But I think that the two lessons that I might prioritize as I think of the next generation of activist scholars or action researchers, that for me were critically important to cultivate are: learning how to listen. I think so much of the time we listen as a way to prepare to talk rather than to listen from the ground up or from the base of the experiences of the one who is talking.

Hilary: And beyond the wordiness?

Brinton: I am increasingly mobilized to rethink how we think, write and talk about silence. In some of my earlier work I was focused more on silence from the perspective of people who had lived through armed conflict, genocidal violence, and war had been silenced by the military, by the broader society who denied that the massacres had happened and they were not able to speak their truths because those in power denied their realities and would not listen.

But I now am re-examining some of my own work and that of other scholars, particularly through my work in transitional justice and human rights, processes that have been important for survivors of armed conflict to seek justice, truth and reparations. These include, for example, women’s advocacy and activism around violence against women and sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war and, and pushing this through the United Nations and getting it recognized as a gross violation of human rights. Despite the importance of that activism and advocacy, it has hypervisibilized women as victims again, marginalizing their experiences despite the advocates’ intention to contribute to their liberation. So, in the work that I’ve done most recently in Guatemala with 54 Mayan survivors of genocidal violence including rape, Alison Crosby and I have pressed others to think about these women through their protagonism. This means to recognize the ways in which yes they were sexualized as objects and horrifically violated, but also to see the many ways in which they have moved themselves forward, their persistent resistance, and their partnerships with the many other women, including ourselves, who have accompanied them. What the anthropologist and legal scholar, Sally Engle Merry, calls intermediaries.

So, I think as we move forward and as we think about ourselves in terms of the global realities that we’re living in and this moment in which the coronavirus emphasized our global interconnections even more than previously, that those of us who live in the Northern hemisphere and those of us who are white and those of us who have enormous academic privileges from our education need more humility. Through critical reflexivity in feminist PAR we can not only begin to decolonize our post-positivist methodologies through critically reflecting upon our role in these contexts and seeking to undo how we continue to benefit from white supremacy but we have been able to walk alongside the Maya as they persist in decolonizing gendered and racialized power structures that continue to marginalize and oppress them and their communities.
To facilitate our critical reflexivity we need to focus more on the virtues that will allow us to listen to, to learn from, and to recognize the leadership of those within local communities, often among the people of the global South, particularly Indigenous communities, who have sustained and maintained – or recovered – their roots in the Earth and who have begun to build the world that they want to live in. They are the seeds of more creative and alternative responses to the collapse of the environment that we are currently experiencing. And, we are challenged to follow their leadership, to recognize alternative ways of being, towards organizing the transnational anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial social movements through which we can be fully human. I think small community change is critical and dialogic relationality is critical to facilitate and affirm the knowledge that is being generated in those spaces. But we who have access to power and resources need to use it to listen and to help move that knowledge and the knowledge producers up and into power systems and structures that need to be transformed. And the only way to do that is through social movements because those that hold the power in our transnational neoliberal capitalist regimes are not going to take their feet off of the necks of the global majority of the world.

Hilary: Well I find I do have a second final question. We’re very interested in issues of developmental reflexivity at AR+.

You mentioned Bill Torbert – who has inspired the field with action inquiry practiced as a way to develop capacity with vertical leadership development. This is a territory that Bob Kegan and Susanna Cook Greuter have helped map since Piaget made it mainstream. So I notice you spoke of essentially turning the camera around in your own psychoanalytic psychodrama work. I understood this helped you manage or contain your emotions so as to remain of service. Do you see that as a developmental praxis? What do you think are the reflexive-developmental requirements for those who work in this field?

Brinton: A very challenging final question. Well, I certainly would say that, if I think about my own process, which is only an N of one, that it was most definitely critical for my developmental processes as an action researcher and an activist scholar. There is something that I deeply appreciate about youth and the young adults that I teach and that is the energy and the lack of patience that they often exhibit – that I often exhibited in my youth – when they are pushing for transformative change. I’m not always sure I envision change in quite the ways some of them do. I think that energy is some of why I have stayed in the university as long as I have. I enjoy the teaching learning process with them, especially when some of that energy drives our conversations. That said, I realize that what I enjoy most is being with the rural Mayan women and their families, facilitating creative workshops through which they document their lives and press for creating better futures for their children and their communities. Their learning processes are deeply grounded in years of experience, often filled with what Arthur Kleinman calls social suffering and what Veena Das calls the “everyday work of repair.” And accompanying them as they rethread life is a privilege, and a time and space in which I continue to learn.

And that learning is really only possible with years of my own experiences among them – and the time I spent taking care of myself and experienced how the creative techniques facilitated my self-understanding and development – or what you describe as “turning the camera” on myself.
I think that there is a need for a certain amount of lived experience and, perhaps more importantly, a valuing of one’s own experience as well as being able to critique it, in order to engage in this kind of action research within and across the chasms of difference and racialized and gendered and classed systems and structures.

I think sometimes you may have an experience of suffering, but you don’t value it, pause to reflect on it, as an experience through which to grow – or the need for your own repair. In the U.S. and particularly among the youth, the focus is on the future, not on the past or the present. And, there is not always a recognition of the need for the experiences of the older generations. So that’s part of why I think intergenerational activist scholarship and intergenerational organizing is really interesting, provocative, and promising. But I find it exceptionally difficult in the United States. I have failed at it in some of the organizations that I’ve started and that I have facilitated over the years.


So, thinking about your question, about the next generation of action researchers. Part of the challenge is that they sometimes or even often have their own ideas of what needs to be done and how; and they don’t want to be brought onto something that someone else has created; and this makes a certain amount of sense. But it’s also, in part, I think, I think one of the things that comes developmentally, or through the aging process, and maybe it doesn’t come for everyone, but in my own work in rural communities where people’s conceptions of time are not linear and do not negate the past but rather believe that former generations are present in the everyday and time is cyclical, something critical has been patience. It’s linked to what I talked about before in terms of listening. But it’s more than that.

Hilary: I am glad I asked the question. Your reflections are rich.

Brinton: And the other thing which I think I discovered when I was in my late twenties and early thirties when I first met the Maya, was that the revolution was – and – is not “around the corner” – an unrealistic sense that I had cultivated in my experiences in Paris at 19 and then in my anti-war movement work… and that it is rather a lifetime of processes, of movements forward, and in reverse… and it is not going to happen in my lifetime. And increasingly, with the years, a sense that each act counts, every drop in the ocean counts, every bit of what we do is important. And I think that for much of my youth, I thought I had to do the big thing in order for it to be important. And more and more I like the image of the pebble tossed into a pond or other body of quiet or calm water; it ripples in multiple concentric circles, and each of us is, and if we’re lucky, we form friends as family, alongside others who are also taking actions that ripple. I don’t think I had sufficient humility when I was younger. And I don’t think I appreciated the limitations of any human life, the gift, the possibility, but the limitation of any single human life.


So yes, in that sense, I am not, as my colleagues and I tell each other, I’m not a developmental psychologist. But in the sense of your last question, I do think my journey has been an iterative, a cyclical and a developmental process, one characterized by multiple moments, by opportunities, for critical reflexivity, for further training and development, for taking actions and reflecting on them alongside multiple colleagues, friends, and those I have accompanied and who have accompanied me, in order to act again.

Hilary: Thank you! I was touched when you said you began to understand the deep impact of your work as a pebble in a pond. Maybe a big stone is a better description. Especially in that community of 54 survivors of sexual violence in Guatemala. You’ve made a significant difference Brinton. And I am grateful for your sharing with me.

Brinton: Thank you for this opportunity. I look forward to figuring out how it might be of value to you to connect more with AR+. Let’s stay in touch!

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