Reflexivity

Voices from the In-Between: Aporias, Reverberations, and Audiences
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of Massachusetts Amherst

“When I saw you with the laptop,” Cecilia said to me, “I thought you must be really far behind on your presentation.”  More or less! I was in my “live” discourse and dynamics mode, self-interestedly collecting connections with other presenters (or at least with their topics). I wanted to show as well as tell about my findings and speculations based on the research I’ve done concerning language, meaning, and simultaneous interpretation.  The conference would have gone by in a blur for me, otherwise. As it was, I had a handful of heartfelt conversations with fascinating human beings, beginning at the banquet, smuggled into the quiet of rehearsal/prep space in presentation rooms, and during breaks over the abundance of food.

Warning! Relationship implied!

Huda did not believe that I really wanted to quote her presentation. “You really are dangerous!” exclaimed Nimmi, before vanishing back to Texas. Jiwei questioned the possibility of as fluid an identity as I propose – that I am ‘called into being’ by the interactions I have with others, especially those that are overtly communicative. (I’m not saying its easy, only that it can be extraordinary.)

The keynote presenter, Vittorio Marchis, emphasized the importance of ritual to memory, explaining the mind’s need for regular re-freshing of knowledge and society’s need for icons representing history: lest we forget. He took us on a romp through Italian magazine covers in the era post-WWII, showing what he described as “the bearable weightness of things” in-between the use of images of current scientific progress and fine artistic works projecting images of the future, which he described as “prophecies.”

As far as invoking a certain quality of timespace, what more important social ritual than eating together? Juan checked in on everyone as we dined at the Faculty Club; the exuberant conviviality carried everyone through the cold rain we had to traverse afterward.

With the theory, you can move…

Nimmi set the tone for a great day by busting the title of my talk: “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Could be! Her Rumblings included a quote from KS Maniam that struck me as a description of how I do action research.

“…me?

I’m going out there, into the … incomprehensible….”

When I got to this slide during my presentation, my peripheral vision detected Edwin nodding. I hope I haven’t taken Maniam’s words out of context, but I was gratified at the evidence of resonance that my usage fits what others experience when I’m “on.” (It’s not like I know where we’re going, either!) Nimmi was on the panel Negotiating Hybrid Identities with Xuefei and Huda, and (it seemed to me) they were all engaged with exploring the search for a center – for some thing or some way to ground be-ing – you know – living awake on this planet right now, wherever we are, with whomever is there, too! Huda’s presentation on Ghada Al-Samman suggested one’s orientation to time is relevant, as in, does one look to the past or the future for points-of-reference? A debate was inspired by Xuefei concerning whether “assimilation” can be construed as a mix of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ features or needs to be understand exclusively in the negative.

Industrialization, Race, and Displacement

Darlene asked me, later, about her claim of experiencing the brutality of displacement even though it happened four centuries ago. I think there is a qualitative difference between people who have suffered physically just to survive and those of us who have had that part soft, but I agree with Enhua’s response that it’s all about when industrialization happened to hit your family: this generation or several generations back. The cumulative effect of migration having occurred in historical time for most white Americans appears most obviously in the disconnect from the land. I am not atypical, having parents who met in a city distant from where they grew up, and then continued to move around.  I have no home rooted in place; only the sensibilities of comfort I create for myself in the spaces I happen to be.

Choosing what we carry

I met Maria waiting for the panel on Authorship and Narrative Techniques. The next day I would be stunned by her story, shocked by the contrast with our joyous first encounter. Meanwhile, Cecilia’s presentation, Blind Spot: The In-Between-ness of a Child Narrator sparked a lively post-panel discussion and reminded me of the interpersonal communication tool by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingram, the Johari Window. The dynamic processes of feedback (sharing what I know/perceive about you) and disclosure (telling about myself) are so important! (It crosses my mind, now, to wonder if there is a parallel with the Chinese “mirror” that Enhua mentioned, in which one is supposed to see one’s true self?

Navigators of the In-Between

Morna labeled us conference participants as “navigators of the in-between” while folks debated whether a child could be wise in the ways depicted by Lya Luft, the  author of O Ponto Cego, featured in Cecilia’s talk.  The Q&A following this session was the one I found most stimulating.

A quote from Herman Melville that Brian had used kept floating through my mind, in reference to the space of a sailing ship (one of its chronotopes): “We expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe.” From this forward-looking perspective (which I appreciate despite its reliance on the nation), I went to the panel on Theorizing Coloniality and Postcoloniality, where the gaze of the presenters was focused keenly on the past.

Where do creoles come from? Beccie enthused on her problematic. I’d like to think about this more in contemporary terms – when/why/how do new languages still come into being (or are we killing off this possibility as surely as old languages are dying?) Juan noticed the power of the colonizer everywhere, and Loc Pham’s description of the Vietnamese ‘non-identification’ strategy intrigues with the evidence of such apparent non-resistance being a powerful mode for preserving cultural integrity.

A frontier that unites rather than a barrier that divides

I’ll be honest, sometimes the theorizing gets too abstract for me – yes yes I know, as if my work doesn’t go there too (grin). Still, I’m with Javier when he said, “The fundamental issue is not to come up with a perfect name, but to understand what is going on and ____”. Funny, my notes stop there – did I not hear the rest? Was I distracted by someone or something else? For me it is the understanding in order to act, or even misunderstanding but still acting so as to stay engaged with those who are different than me – and together finding ways to be here and move on with attention to the implicit as well as explicit relationships. This is what I heard in the Personal Narratives of In-Between-ess shared by Maria, Claudio & Marcelo, and Elena: no matter what has happened to us – childhood trauma or adult humiliation – we must bear up, dig down, find an ethical way to go on.

The In-Betweeners

I was thrilled when Edwin said I “might be on to something” with the distinction I drew between interpretation and translation (dissertation forthcoming). And I’m eager for any uptake on my conjecture that the postmodern condition, defined by David Harvey (1990) as time-space compression, is the historical moment when white people figure out WTF we’ve been doing with language. The next time you’re reading social theory, just notice how many times the word “tension” is used, and then see if you can figure out “what” is “in tension” with “what”? Social theorists deploy “tension” as if it is self-explanatory and obvious (sortof like how people throw around the term “dialectic.”) An engineer (for instance) would be quite unlikely to discuss tension without its complement of compression.

If language (language use, language-in-action, English, Vietnamese, Chinese, Portuguese, literature, poetry, rhyme, whatever you want to include in the category) is the social means by which timespace has become compressed, then it is only through language that we are going to be able to un-compress it.  I support Vittorio Marchis’ conclusion:

“We need more time to talk together and find solutions.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

Returning home after the Science of Team Science conference, I let concentration go subliminal. Cameron Norman’s brief history of developments in team science over the past few years, and his list of lessons learned/factors contributing to the success of this conference – sifted through my mind, along with conversations I had with two women who are on the ground in terms of dealing with the social in team science. A breadth and depth of wisdom and experience was present at the conference but untapped: not because of deliberate exclusion but due to the inertia of how both “science” and “academia” are typically done.

“The book is blank.”

This quote, from Junot Diaz’ The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, p. 302), refers to the future. Nothing is fixed, even if the most likely paths are already delimited. The class/status and gender hierarchies evident in the conference’s structure and dynamics do not need to remain barriers to the evolution of team science as a collaborative strategy for collective action capable of addressing and solving wicked problems.

Lessons from group development

A query about Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development roughly midway through the conference was left hanging… other parts of that participant’s question enabled panelists’ response. I wondered, at the time, if any of the panelists were familiar with models of the stages of group development. William Schutz’s sharper view on issues of inclusion, control, and affection adds necessary depth to Tuckman’s introductory-level model, most particularly when combined with the group process dimensions identified by Wilfred Bion. Now, in retrospect, I imagine this instance in the Q&A as a moment when a question back to the audience member would have served the entire conference well.

The storming phase of a group’s development involves a range of existential matters, including:

• authority/authorization in terms of the roles people perform for the team,
• individual assessments of worth/value from investing in the team’s group process, the
• staking-out of allegiances, as well as the
• identification of threats, and the
• (possible) emergence of irrational and unreasonable fears.

Most of these dynamics occur below the level of consciousness, either suppressed by politeness or repressed by deep training. Careful attention to patterns and disruptions to patterns in the group’s discourse and dynamics, however, can cue group members to the empirical presence of these unconscious dynamics, opening up opportunities for turning these potentially destructive social forces to operational advantage.

The apparent unanswerability of the question about group development suggests a problematic moment for the group, similar to those that arose later when very specific questions about application found panelists in (what seemed in the moment as) a kind of stunned temporary silence.

Problematics for the Science of Team Science

Science needs an object, and it became clear along the way that the proper target of study for team science remains undefined. In the ambiguity and uncertainty of trying to discover ‘the what’ of team science, ‘the how’ of establishing this object acquires marked significance. Michelle Bennett described this as the need for “teams being recognized as teams…we have experienced it – and are just not ‘talking’ about it.”

Deciding what to measure in & for team science will simultaneously determine which measurements to use. The usual dichotomies pit quantitative versus qualitative, macro against micro; the core question regards what is accepted as empirical evidence. Must one have a sample of thousands in order to produce something-called-knowledge, or can a case study generate and teach at a level of equivalent practical value? Can the discourse of this one conference inform us about the field as a whole? This idea is not far-fetched. When confronted by comparable non-linearity, math-minded scientists and engineers extrapolate, justifying generalizing assumptions in order to scale complex problems down to manageable size.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

It might sound hokey, but the question came up so many times, Who can help us? And the answer played variations of the same: Hire a facilitator. Find an un-invested moderator. Refer to the research. What about: train ourselves! It would mean

• adopting an ethic of co-learning,
• either de-privileging the individual expert or broadening the scope of expertise that is recognized as valuable/necessary, and
• making ourselves the object of analysis and reflection.

Teresa Woodruff’s statement bears repeating, “It is not that team science is in its infancy, it is that you are learning to work the way that women have always worked.”

Gender is not the whole story, I can name several men working as teammates even if the group’s membership and task is vague. But there may be something to noticing differences in the way men are typically trained in teamwork:  as tightly-knit athletic or military units with a clear and unambiguous objective toward which every member is supposed to equally strive. The boundaries and conditions within which men (in general) learn to identify themselves as part of a team are essentially linear, especially if compared with the constraints and styles by which women tend to identify with others who are moving only roughly in the same direction.

Constructing common ground or a new mental model?

I eavesdropped on a conversation between Stephen Fiore and Maria Scharf as they parsed the difference among the capacities of various team science tools, the diverse uses and interpretations of the uses of these tools, and the processes by which teams in team science might come to understand each other. They made an interesting distinction between “common ground” that is achieved through a process of building a shared vocabulary together over time and the “mental models” of parties to this common ground process – models that may or may not be shared, even though a basic understanding has been forged.

If I was to go out on a limb (or, further out on the one I’ve been crawling along already!), I would diagnose that practitioners and researchers of team science are in a process of constructing common ground. Further, I would prescribe that one way to promote the spread of commonality is to simultaneously generate and popularize a mental model that encourages acknowledgment of relationalism, i.e., of the co-constructed interrelations inherent in the social interaction processes of teaming.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

Discourse patterns and outliers

By all measures, the first conference on the Science of Team Science is a resounding success. The speakers are excellent, the overall mood enthusiastic, questions and engagement from the audience compelling, and the basic organization flawless. I’ve met intriguing people doing fascinating stuff, and I couldn’t be happier with the participation in James’ and my action research project. Here is a preliminary summary of results of the critical discourse analysis of the conference’s group dynamics, culled from the backchannel twitter feed, conversations with participants, and formally presented material.

A tight rein on the social

This is a professional, academic event. The titillation of a problematic moment reconfigured the conference group yesterday afternoon, when a presenter used a sexual analogy to drive home a point. Suddenly we were a slightly more intimate group! I had been intrigued when an audience member asked about the utility of Tuckman’s stages of group development, asking about the possibility of getting through the storming stage quickly. If we are going to have ‘a storm’ here at this conference, it will involve trying to unsettle the normal science paradigm in order to discover and present practical information that is useful in application.

Different languages: Science versus the Social?

In the midst of the main discursive tone of praise and excitement, there have been quiet yet persistent voices of dissatisfaction. The theories, methodological research and analysis tools, and reports of research results are fascinating and … hard to make sense of in terms of practical guidelines for what to do on the ground while working in teams to ensure their success. The social is posed as measures of interaction, not as actual human interrelating. Getting into the nitty-gritty was even discouraged by one example shared from the floor. His advice to “focus on the problem” and “not on the process” was not countered in any significant way.

Applying what we’ve learned

The above summary is evidence confirming the hypotheses posed by our poster, Bringing the Social to Team Science.

1. The quality of content produced is directly related to the amount of attention paid to process issues.
2. It is very difficult to pay attention to content and process at the same time.
3. Nonetheless, events occur during the work of team members that signals the presence of process; these signals can be understood as cues to shift attention from content/task accomplishment to relational/process matters.
4. Groups and organizations are in a constant state of flex. You need a great deal of organization and energy to sustain continuity. This is accomplished though power relations embedded in the social.

A proposal to extend the scope of the action research project

What if several research teams self-selected, right here-and-now during this first annual conference, to participate in a continuing investigation of how to bring the social into the science? I believe we have the tools; do we have the will? The study could run over the course of the next year, with results to be reported at next year’s conference.

Popularity: 1% [?]