6 minute read
Starting with the citizen's voice in a community organization: the successes and challenges of putting epistemic justice into practice
By Mathilde Manon // doctoral student in urban studies and Grégoire Autin // researcher, research coordinator at Parole d’excluEs .
Developing Collaborative ActionsSince 2006, the organization Parole d'excluEs has been working to implement collective projects to fight poverty and social exclusion in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Montreal. Combining action-research and citizen mobilization, the organization begins with citizens' voices to develop actions by and for people living in poverty and social exclusion, adopting a posture of epistemic justice. By epistemic justice posture, we mean a willingness and an effort to give credibility to the experience of people living in a situation of poverty and social exclusion, and to put forward their ideas and knowledge to remedy the issues in the neighbourhood. Giving credibility to the words of people who are seldom heard, who are not listened to enough, because of their economic status, their gender, their skin colour or cultural background, their place of residence or their level of education, seems to us to be directly in line with the social justice vision of this organization.
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BEGINNING WITH THE VOICE OF CITIZENS TO TRANSFORM THE NEIGHBORHOOD: A POSTURE OF EPISTEMIC JUSTICE
The concept of epistemic justice is difficult to define. It can be interpreted rather negatively, based on the inequalities of values attributed to experiences, knowledge or ideas in relation to the social, gender, racial or economic status of the people who express them. Epistemic inequalities lead to an inability to speak about life and experiences, but also to a collective inability to hear and give credibility to the words of certain people and groups1. The effects on the lives of these people are negative: the inability to file a complaint for women who are victims of sexual assault, the invisibility of the racism experienced by racialized people or the persistence of discriminatory practices in public services. For example, during a study on Health Services in Montreal-North, Heck and Lapalme (2017) gathered the testimony of people who said they did not feel listened to or taken seriously by health professionals2. This resulted in discrimination in the treatment given to these individuals, which could go as far as providing inadequate care for their health problems.
By giving a voice to people experiencing social exclusion and poverty, Parole d'excluEs seeks to fight against these epistemic inequalities and to empower those who directly experience the consequences of social and economic inequalities. The citizens' voice serves as a basis for understanding local issues, and the actions implemented with the people concerned are based on the citizens' needs and aspirations.
PUTTING A POSTURE INTO PRACTICE: INTERSECTION OF KNOWLEDGE TO TAKE ACTION
Parole d’excluEs recognizes the complementarity of knowledge by harnessing several forms of knowledge:
• the knowledge of citizens living on the territory (we are talking here about their experiences of local issues, but also their thoughts on how to solve them);
• the knowledge of practitioners intervening on the territory (in particular community-based persons);
• academic knowledge, which combines the analytical skills of researchers with their theoretical knowledge.
None of these three types of knowledge, considered separately, is sufficient to grasp all the social issues of the neighbourhood. Their combination leads to a collective knowledge and a common vision of the issues and possible solutions to address them. This approach does not only aim at producing knowledge3: it is above all about enhancing the capacity of local stakeholders, including the residents of the neighbourhood, to take action in order to transform their neighbourhood. It is in this respect that this intersection of knowledge translates Parole d'excluEs' posture of epistemic justice and puts it into practice.
1 Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus, The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice. Routledge, 2017 Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007. Godrie, Baptiste et Dos Santos, Marie « Présentation : inégalités sociales, production des savoirs et de l’ignorance ». Sociologie et sociétés 49, no 1 (2017) : 7–31. https://doi.org/10.7202/1042804ar 2 Heck et Lapalme, « Étude sur les besoins et aspirations des citoyenNEs en termes de services de santé à Montréal-Nord. Vers un service complémentaire de santé dans le quartier », Blogue IUPE, 2017 : http://www.parole-dexclues.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Heck-Lapalme-ServiceSante-2017.pdf 3 See the various publications on the IUPE blog: https://iupe.wordpress.com/
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A SIMPLE GOAL, GREAT CHALLENGES
Giving a voice to socially excluded people, building solutions with them that will improve their living conditions; these objectives may seem simple. But an analysis of the epistemic justice posture of Parole d'excluEs reveals a number of challenges in the practical work.
There is a great deal of work to be done to reverse the deeply rooted dynamics of power within the groups. The sharing of voices and leadership among the citizens involved in the organization requires constant vigilance. For example, the people with the most diplomas or those with the best knowledge of French may participate more in the discussions, while others who are less confident in their ability to express themselves may withdraw from the group.
The organization wants to bring together different people to share a common vision of local issues and to build common projects. However, the heterogeneity of opinions or ways of expressing themselves can lead to tensions and conflicts, which practitioners must defuse.
Finally, they have shown a tendency to gather according to gender or ethnocultural identity. This last challenge highlights the need for the organization to reflect on its practices, to consider the non-mix as a necessary step in the process of giving a voice to certain groups in order for them to share their experiences.
CO-CONSTRUCTING A TOOL FOR REFLECTION ON EPISTEMIC JUSTICE
In a second phase of this research, we seek to co-construct with the Parole d'excluEs work team a tool to guide the decisions made by the organization from an epistemic justice perspective. It takes the form of a compass, whose cardinal and inter-cardinal points are questions that allow us to explore the role of each of the knowledge and find out how the people who hold this knowledge take part in the action. Rather than an evaluation tool, this compass is a way to continuously analyze the place of each person in the decisions made by the organization. We tested the compass with the Parole d'excluEs team and researchers working closely with the organization on the General Store project, a multiple service point ranging from food to health support and referral, run by a group of citizens. The cardinal point "Who speaks" showed that the leader of the group, who has been involved in the organization for a long time, seems to be very well equipped to carry out the project, particularly because he has received training in shared leadership. The question, "Who is doing it?" showed that the majority of the citizens involved in the project were white people of Quebec origin living in a situation of poverty and social exclusion. Nonetheless, these individuals made an effort to survey other neighborhood residents to learn about their needs in order to tailor the services offered by the general store. Answering the compass questions allows us to explore the blind spots of this project and to notice that it does not reach all the cultural diversity of the neighbourhood.
We will continue to experiment with this tool and produce a user’s guide. We hope to be able to transfer it and make it useful to other communities wishing to make visible and audible the voices of those who are not sufficiently heard and listened to.
