Collaborative Analysis and Dissemination

The practice of speaking for others is often born of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another's situation or as one who can champion a just cause and thus achieve glory and praise. And the effect of the practice of speaking for others is often, though not always, erasure and a reinscription of sexual, national, and other kinds of hierarchies.

(Alcoff, 1991, p. 29)

Several theoretical arguments have been formulated to problematize the act of speaking for or representing others – especially those who are marginalized, disempowered, subjugated, or silenced in society. Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, and postcolonial feminist, Gayatri Spivak, have used the term “the subaltern” to describe those groups who are politically, socially, and often geographically excluded from hegemonic power structures. Spivak, in particular, asked the compelling question, “can the subaltern speak?” to theorize the extent to which those who have been subjugated by colonial powers can know and advocate for a liberated way of being when they have often internalized oppressive (racist, patriarchal) power structures. This broad philosophical question is deeply imbedded in the ethical consideration of how – and by whom - community engaged research findings are analyzed, interpreted, and revised. To this end, Linda Alcoff (1991) published a widely read essay entitled “The problem of speaking for others” in which she contends that not only is it impossible to transcend one’s location/positionality in research and writing, but also, that “location is epistemically salient” (p. 7) and certain privileged locations are “discursively dangerous” in that “the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted in many cases in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for” (p. 7).

These theoretical foundations form the bedrock of the CER ethical principle that community partners and research participants must be involved not only in the earlier phases (e.g. design and recruitment) of the research, but also in the meaning-making and dissemination phases. To this end, Khodyakov and colleagues assert that university researchers should be “ready to involve community in interpretation and dissemination: Study findings should be analyzed, interpreted, and disseminated with the active participation of community partners and community members at large” (p.54). Thus, analysis, interpretation, and revisions in the post-data collection phase, require a significant relinquishment of control on the part of the university research team, and an ongoing, collaborative effort to weave together the (often disparate) epistemological and ontological analyses of study team members.