Dialectics of Engaged Research
The Libby research program illustrates several ethical tensions that arise when engaging a community in conflict in research. For example, initial meetings with interest groups (e.g., county commissioners, EPA) during the background visit to Libby involved contained interactions within “safe” relatively homogeneous groups.
That is, interest group members were able to express particular points of view (e.g., one county commissioner thought too much action was occurring around the disaster) and facilitated the researchers’ ability to focus on listening nonjudgmentally. Thus, these conversations were both open and protected. The same was true of the homogeneous focus groups of stakeholders.Important dialectics were evident in the external researchers’ relationship with the community research partner, especially the behavioral research coordinator/social worker. Both sets of partners bring expertise to the table. The CARD partner brings expertise about the community, its history, and the many and nuanced contexts for understanding and interpreting data. The CARD partner provides oversight to interpretations to ensure the fidelity of context and nuance. The external researchers have been committed to active inclusion of the CARD research partners in planning, implementing, and reporting research. Hernandez reviews research plans and grant applications, and actively participates in research presentations at professional meetings and as an author on manuscripts. Thus, both partners bring independent and overlapping expertise to the research endeavor.
With regard to the community as a whole, the dialectic of listening rather than advising has dominated the initial descriptive projects. The researchers explicitly sought to “give voice” to the community by “listening” via focus group and survey data. In fact, the focus group presentations to interest groups in the community and to the public were titled “In Your Own Words,” and the population-based survey project—and the survey itself—was titled “The Voices of Libby,” with promotional posters encouraging community members to “make your voice heard.”
In closing, this case not only brings together the three main threads of our chapter— conflict, engagement, and ethics—but also offers profound lessons for researchers.
They must be sensitive not only to presented tensions in a community but also to the fact that those very tensions and one’s understanding of them are part of a developing relationship in which the researcher, regardless of epistemological standpoint, necessarily assumes responsibility along with involvement. Although not all research projects of this nature will be as complex, important, or sustained as this one, the cautions as well as the model for doing good work are a source of information and inspiration.Conclusion
We have reviewed three seemingly disparate areas—conflict, community engagement, and applied ethics—with attention to their integrative potential at this point in the development of communication studies. We maintain that the communication discipline is particularly well poised to do this theory- and practice-building work. We say this in recognition of both the history and contemporary possibilities in communication studies. Witness, for example, how communication-oriented or -sponsored centers for community deliberation (e.g., the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University) are de facto, if not always explicitly, operating at the intersection we describe.
Attention to explicitly ethical as well as implicitly ethical perspectives on communication within the context of conflict and community connects to the heart of contemporary conceptions of communication process, sometimes in ways that contrast with traditional rhetorical and persuasive notions of communication (see, e.g., Cheney, Lair, Ritz, & Kendall, 2010). Two principal progressions are evident in recent thinking on rhetorical and communication theory: first, the more direct engagement of power in terms of inequalities of parties to various communication transactions (e.g., Makau & Arnett, 1997); and second, a stress on mutuality and equality, often treated under the rubric of “dialogue” (see Barge & Andreas, this volume; cf. Arnett, 1986).
The dialogue metaphor and associated models have become central as the field has embraced diversity and difference in multiple senses (see, e.g., Foss & Griffin, 1995; Makau & Marty, 2001). Finally, dialogue has become perhaps the central term in communication research oriented toward community practice and problem solving (see, e.g., the collection in Shepherd & Rothenbuhler, 2001). Not only from an epistemological standpoint but also in terms of the orientation to practice, mutual understanding and insight are the prevailing objectives of interaction within the context of community engagement with sensitivity to, illumination of, and sometimes direct engagement of conflict.We note as well that multiple levels of analysis are relevant. The conflict literature is now quite articulated in this area, including in the wider academic arena where peace and conflict studies have been joined. Through that union, bridges across micro- and macroperspectives have been built (notably, in the creation of the Peace and Justice Studies Association in the United States in 2001 as well as in the diversification of membership and topical concerns within the International Peace Research Association).
Community engagement involves aspects of conflict that will be interpersonal as well as group-based and may well exhibit characteristics derived from both structural features of the situation (e.g., economy and culture, broadly conceived) and collective experience (e.g., a history of oppression, prejudice, or stigma). The processing of historical trauma in communities, aiming toward deep reconciliation borne of mutual understanding, is one example where all levels of analysis may be pertinent. For example, Derezotes (in press), considering Native American perspectives on the punctuation of U.S. history, called for extraordinary awareness and special tools of the researchers/partners/facilitators. Other such examples can be found in interrelated and multilevel examinations of apology (Lazare, 2005), forgiveness (Fitness & Peterson, 2007), and reconciliation (Doxtader & Salazar, 2007; Ndura-Ouedraogo & Makoba, 2008).
In sum, we find this to be an opportune time in the development of our discipline for further investigation of all major topics represented in this chapter. Issues of community conflict, engaged research, and applied ethics not only span traditional areas of our field but also direct us toward the full potential for theoretically informed but practically oriented research on pressing social problems.
Note
1. This research was conducted as part of a larger Communication and Outreach project (Rebecca J. Cline, Project PI) by the National Center for Vermiculite and Asbestos Related Cancers (NCVAC) at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, Detroit, Michigan. NCVAC funding came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, H75/ CCH524709-0, John C. Ruckdeschel (PI).