Getting Personal

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CONTENTS CONTENTS CONTENTS 2 the project

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us

7 sam’s art 9

saskia’s art

kiera’s art 1 1

13erica’s art 15 glossary and literature

THE PROJECT THE PROJECT THE PROJECT WELCOME TO GETTING PERSONAL! Our names are Sam, Saskia, Kiera, and Erica, and we are four graduate students currently completing research in the areas of geography, environmental studies, and health promotion at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. As part of a school project, we created Getting Personal as an opportunity to converse with one another about positionality and reflexivity in the context of our own research projects. With a different one of us at the focal point for each episode, we share how our personal identities, backgrounds, and experiences have shaped who we are today, and through “kitchen-table” conversation, we ponder how these personal subjectivities make their way into our work. We hope these conversations will resonate with fellow graduate students as they embark on their own research journeys, as we believe that reflexive discussion can help those from any discipline to improve their research practice by becoming more knowledgeable about positionality and ethics.

THIS ZINE IS AN EXTENSION OF OUR PODCAST PROJECT. We wanted to create the space to engage with some of the topics that we brought up in our podcast discussions through art. Our art pieces follow the order of our episodes: Sam, Saskia, Kiera, and Erica. We hope that you’re able to enjoy the zine in tandem with the podcast, as well as enjoy it as a distinct, curated work of art.

THANK YOU FOR READING! Yours, Sam, Saskia, Kiera, and Erica

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US US US

SAM MISHOS ep1 Sam Mishos (she/her) is a white settler scholar pursuing her Master of Arts degree in Geography at Queen’s University, where she previously completed a Bachelor of Science majoring in Biochemistry.

Her research interests include environmental justice, knowledge reconciliation, integrative science, and policy co-production. Working with Dr. Heather Castleden, Sam’s thesis project will be using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to help pilot a framework that engages Indigenous knowledge systems alongside Western science at the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, situated on Treaty #3 Anishinaabe Nation Territory.

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LISTEN TO SAM’S EPISODE HERE

SASKIA DE WILDT ep2 One narrative at a time, as I wayfare through the world, I tell stories. To disrupt. To invite you in. Or to call you out. To challenge perspectives. And to inspire radical change for a more inclusive, just and sustainable world. As an Art-director I rely on my conceptual design skills to come up with appealing projects that challenge you to see people, places and material with new eyes.

As a researcher I embed this process in my thinking. Transcending academic disciplinary boundaries for inclusive and considerate knowledge creation through arts-based, sensory and experiential methods. As a maker, I prefer to work in partnership with organizations, communities and publication platforms. I am a firm believer in collaborative processes. But above all, I am a wayfarer. I flow between cultures, disciplines and people. I am a connecter. And a storyteller. My work transcends boundaries and binaries and can’t be contained within disciplines or labels. I am a creator/researcher/designer and much more.

LISTEN TO SASKIA’S EPISODE HERE

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KIERA McMASTER ep3 Hi! I’m Kiera, a first year Master’s student in the faculty of Geography and Planning at Queen’s.

I’m currently doing my MA remotely, from Toronto, on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnabeg, Missisaugas of the Credit, Chippewa, and Wendat peoples. My research is related to themes of food security, food justice, and urban agriculture. I love to incorporate themes of care, joy, and celebration into my work.

I’m an oldest sister, a plant mom, an avid crocheter, and a pandemic puzzler.

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LISTEN TO KIERA’S EPISODE HERE

ERICA SHARDLOW ep4 Hello! My name is Erica (she/her), and I am a white settler Canadian currently in the first year of my Master’s program at Queen’s University, living in what we call Prince Edward County, Ontario. I am beginning my research journey in the areas of health promotion, sustainability, and climate action.

For my project I will be engaging in arts-based, participatory action research with Indigenous youth in Ontario, on community-based land stewardship and energy transitions. Those who know me know that I feel happiest outside, am always laughing about nothing, and love finding ways to connect with others.

LISTEN TO ERICA’S EPISODE HERE

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Kohl, E., & McCutcheon, P. (2015). Kitchen table reflexivity: Negotiating positionality through everyday talk. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(6), 747-763.

Mullings, B. (1999). Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in a crosscultural setting. Geoforum, 30(4), 337-350.

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Press.

Castleden, H., Sloan Morgan, V., & Lamb, C. (2012). “I spent the first year drinking tea”: Exploring Canadian university researchers’ perspectives on community-based participatory research involving Indigenous peoples. The Canadian Geographer 56(2), 160-179v

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Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), 305–320.

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making food it’s 6:30 on a Tuesday morning and I am in the kitchen, cold and groggy, scrambling eggs.

I am making breakfast for my boyfriend and I before class, because making food is showing someone you care. it’s the same groundhog day over and over again of the pandemic.

I’m holding onto my crochet hook like it will provide protection and i am making eggs. eggs are a waste of yarn compared to hats, scarves, or mittens, but i am making them anyway, because making food is showing someone you care.

I am a woman in the kitchen, researching the kitchen, researching what it means to care, what it means to nuture someone, something, a research project from the sprout of an idea, to a full-fledged thesis. what does it mean to be a woman in this space? what does it mean to feel so comfortable here? making eggs, making surveys, making something out of a little bit of nothing, because making something is showing someone you care.

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Reclaiming Ourselves Through Art For as long as I can remember I have loved drawing the way I feel. As someone who has struggled with identity, I always felt that I could express myself through art in ways I never could with words or labels. Over time, as I became drawn to environmental health and the impacts of climate change, I began incorporating the environment into the way I define myself. My personal ties to art, identity, health and nature have ultimately brought me to my current research, supporting the perspectives of urban Indigenous youth on local climate transitions through the creation and sharing of personal artwork.

Our unique backgrounds and worldviews naturally shape the things we do, the things we feel, and the way we define ourselves. These aspects of many peoples’ identities, especially within Indigenous populations, have for too long been scrutinized, labeled, and translated narrowly into the words of dominant Western literature. Not just for my own research, but for anyone, anywhere, who has ever felt reduced to definitions beyond their own – I hope that art can help us to connect with one another, dismantle the boxes that seek to define us, and reclaim all that has been said about us.

I hope the drawing to the left can speak for itself, but the painting is something I created based off a photo I took from a very meaningful place that helped shape who I am, a place I have a hard time attributing words to. I wanted both pieces to express how easily positivist and quantitative research paradigms might fail to capture so much personal meaning and emotion, and thus a major part of who we are.

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GLOSSARY & LIT GLOSSARY & LIT GLOSSARY & LIT Strega & Brown (Eds.,). (2015). Research as Resistance.

• Epistemology -- ways of knowing; how do we come to define knowledge? how do we know what is real? how is it possible to know the world?

• Ontology -- nature of being/reality; what is real? what is our conception of the world?

• Anti-oppressive research • Positivism -- quantitative approaches, e.g., the scientific method; assumes rational, neutral, objective subject • Interpretivism -- qualitative approaches; search for understandings rather than ‘facts’ Billo & Heimstra. (2013). Mediating messiness: expanding ideas of flexibility, reflexivity, and embodiment in fieldwork.

• Reflexivity -- reflection on the conditions through which research is produced, disseminated, and received • Embodiment -- to ‘[move] beyond analyses of policy and structure, to the more fluid, daily, personal interactions ... to locate political processes in a time and a place’ • Flexibility -- adaptability, dynamism, fluidity Guillemin & Gillam. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and ‘Ethically important moments’ in research.

• Procedural ethics -- formal codes, protocols, ethics applications • Ethics in practice -- i.e., ethics in fieldwork • Microethics -- not major ethical dilemmas, but ‘everyday’ ethics • Ethically important moments England. (1994). Getting personal: Reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research.

• Positionality -- social, cultural, subject positions that affect how one constructs what they know, how they know, etc.

• Biography -- one’s life story • Dialogism -- use of conversation or shared dialogue to explore the meaning of something • Betweenness

Y & LIT SARY & LIT Y & LIT

Mullings. (1999). Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in a cross-cultural setting.

• Qualitative methods -- interviews, participant observation • Positional spaces -- ‘areas where the situated knowledges of both parties in the interview encounter, engender a level of trust and cooperation’ • Insider / Outsider -- i.e., researchers are considered ‘insiders’ when they belong to a particular group being researched, and vice versa • Partial knowledge / Situated knowledge Kohl & McCutcheon. (2015). Kitchen table reflexivity: negotiating positionality through everyday talk • Kitchen table reflexivity -- ‘an exploration of an individual’s positionality and its relationship to their research carried out through formal and informal conversations with others’ (i.e., everyday talk) • Self-indulgent moments • Autoethnography -- self-reflection to explore personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings deLeeuw, Cameron, & Greenwood. (2012). Participatory and community-based research, Indigenous geographies, and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement.

• Asymmetries of power -- i.e., inherent in relationships formed in research/fieldwork • Friendship -- i.e., non-research friendships as space for critique & relational accountability Wilson. (2008). Research is Ceremony.

• Indigenist research / Indigenous research paradigm • Relational accountability / Relationality -- i.e. to each other, to ideas/knowledge, to the land/environment, to the cosmos; relationships are reality • Storytelling Janes. (2016). Democratic encounters? Epistemic privilege, power, and community-based participatory action research.

• Epistemic privilege -- e.g., dominant ways of knowing privileged in the academy • Knowledge production & knowledge hierarchies • Postcolonial analysis -- ‘goes beyond a critique of the oppressive features of these subjectivities and spaces to inquire into the specific participatory techniques that re/ produce epistemic privilege’

ANY COMMENTS? EMAIL US AT GETTINGPERSONALPROJECT@ GMAIL.COM

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