Too Close to the Work/There is Nothing Right Now

• In Event: Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Research With Youth and Communities

Abstract

Each one of us gets phone calls. Sometimes they are from school counselors, yet often the voice is young. And every time we do a talk someone hangs around after, by the door. On the phone, at a talk, in a school, the question is always the same: Is there anything you can do for me? We recycle the same responses: our time and care, lists of advocacy organizations and groups to connect to, and sometimes rhetoric about revolution and justice, but the end result for the many undocumented men and women that ask this question is the same: There is nothing right now.

Our organizing and research team has been invested in just immigration reform that unifies families, offers clear legalization pathways, and eradicates punishing immigration policies. We have interviewed over 40 currently and formerly undocumented youths and collected oral histories, centering on educational experiences and other issues, including family, border crossings, relationships to U.S. identity, and future plans. Immigration continues to shape the lives of each member of this team. Most of us were at some time undocumented.

Through our research, we found ourselves, many times, overcome by emotion. Driving away from a meeting on immigration mobilization or a conversation with a young person, we cry. We were, we told ourselves, too close to the work. We found ourselves angry during our planning and writing meetings, upset while trying to think and to write. Our anger was associated with legislative and institutional failures, and anxiety and fear – about the people we work with and care about. Sometimes our engagements triggered our own immigration experiences of separation, anxiety, fear and loss. Occasionally we were exhilarated - inspired by our collaborations and the work of many in the immigrant justice movement.

Through engagement with work on political feelings including affect theory, we came to understand our bad feelings as public and pervasive, rather than private and local. As Feel Tank Chicago (2008) points out, politics is a ‘world of orchestrated feeling’ (3). Aiming at “emotional epistemology” (Feel Tank Chicago 2008, p. 2), or, knowing through (attending to) feelings in this way – thinking of them contextually, as meaningful in social ways – is the focus of this paper that centers our participatory research on immigration. Our feelings demonstrate how affect is used to regulate not just our field’s definitions of professional and scholarly activities, including the push to retain the veneer of objectivity, but also many institutions. The twin titles of this piece point to the focus of this paper to share narratives from our methods surrounding what does it means to be “too close to the work,” and also of how we negotiate our response to the frequent reality, “there is nothing right now.”

References

Feel Tank Chicago. (2008). Manifesto. Retrieved from http://www.feeltankchicago.net/ (accessed March
13, 2011)

Passel, J and Cohn, D. (2009). A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States. Pew Hispanic Center. Retrieved from http://www.pew hispanic.org/files/reports/l07pdf.

Authors

• Daysi Diaz-Strong, Elgin Community College

• Maria Luna Duarte, Northeastern Illinois University

• Christina Gomez, Northeastern Illinois University

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University