Maintaining Liminality in Research on the Learning of Animal Rights Activists

• In Event: Methods for Studying Learning in Social Movements: Consequences for the Movements and the Field

Abstract

Research Questions
I offer a critical reflection on the use of participant observation to understand learning among animal rights activists. In the context of a threatening U.S. political milieu, learning researchers have called for greater attention to power (Esmonde & Booker, 2017; The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017). As interest grows in democratic and participatory modes of working with communities (e.g., Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), I ask: what is the place of more “traditional” ethnographic research in relation to social movements and the learning they catalyze? The research project under examination builds on previous research approaching activism from the lens of sociocultural learning theory (Curnow, Davis, & Asher, 2018; Jurow & Shea, 2015; Kirshner, 2008).

Methods
My mode of inquiry is a retrospective examination of the methods-as-practiced in an empirical study. I consider two planes in which liminal positionality became consequential: movement activity and the research field as a social context in its own right. I draw on fieldnotes and methodological memos created over the course of ethnographic fieldwork with an animal rights activist community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Findings
Findings focus on the consequentiality of positioning myself as a non-member participant-observer and the dynamics of balancing closeness and distance. While I introduced myself as a non-member learning researcher, I was frequently encouraged by members to deepen my participation in ways that also reflected the emotional texture of the experiences that members reported to me in interviews. Maintaining liminality provided opportunities to experience recruitment as a key aspect of learning in the movement, an additional resource for triangulating nascent conjectures. Concerns over potential infiltration were also prominent. I discuss how an atmosphere of suspicion structured the trajectories of activists and my own learning within the group.

With respect to the academic reception of this work, I take a pragmatic perspective. While I believe in the moral aims of animal rights, not all movements for justice share a broad base of support in the academy, even among justice-oriented scholars. Some people see this movement as inflected by racist and colonial impulses, or as driven by self-aggrandizement. These questions are endemic for a movement in which the participants are not those directly suffering harm. I report on instances in which fellow researchers warned me against becoming uncritical or “going native.” My liminal positionality provided room to maneuver within the hegemonic politics of the academy. Liminality was an uncomfortable, even sometimes ethically ambiguous, position that nonetheless has allowed me to amplify voices of conscience with whom I agree in principle if not always on tactics.

Significance
Important learning occurs in diverse movements that enjoy diverse reception within academic communities, as they do in communities at large. If we truly believe in serving justice, it may not be tenable only to study movements that have achieved progressive consensus. It may be equally important to understand learning in contentious or even antidemocratic movements, with whom full participation may be anathema.

Author

• Tanner Vea, The Pennsylvania State University