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Melissa Chan

Professor Victoria Lawson

Honors 232C

2 May 2014

Reading Review 2

This weeks readings and discussions have given me a new

perspective on the ideas surrounding marginality of the poor. Rather

than the top-down approach we have focused on thus far, I feel our

discussions illuminated the importance, and perhaps imperativeness,

of also including the bottom-up perspective in our studies and

responses to recognizing and resisting marginality.

As a non-geography student with limited geography background,

the ideas of participatory action research and ethnographic studies are

new to me and I found them to be very interesting examples of the

bottom-up approach.

Privilege seems to afford us a neutrality under which we are able

to study issues of inequality while ignoring our own contributions to

them, as the privileged are also engaged in active struggles to

maintain and increase their privilege (Cahill, 996). There exists this

paradox where the privileged want to and attempt to help the poor and

oppressed through charity work and social programs, etc., but are

unwilling to look at the institutions and societal systems that cause

poverty and oppression in the first place. As Archbishop Hlder Cmara

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put it, When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask

why the poor have no food they call me a communist (Stephens, 998).

Both PAR and ethnography seem to have been formed to combat this

problem of the maintenance of advantage by including the

marginalized in the research conversation.

All three of this weeks readings made the conclusion, as

Professor Lawson phrased it during Thursdays discussion, that there is

a need to get beyond the moment of service delivery towards

enacting actual social change. In regards to the Safe Harbors program,

many of the Tent City residents interviewed saw enhanced shelters as

dehumanizing and perpetuates of the otherness of the homeless

individual (Sparks, 850-51). Many objected to the program forcing

upon them the label of homeless and the negative connotations and

stereotypes societally associated with it (Sparks, 2010). Seeing that

visibility is often a liability, the homeless services Safe Harbors was

attempting to measure seem stuck in that moment of service delivery

as the root causes behind homelessness become increasingly

depoliticized and ignored (Sparks, 849). This also raises the PAR

question of the nature of expertise in who is qualified to make

decisions about homeless services: the privileged in power or those

actually living in poverty?

Reflecting on this situation, I thought about the idea of the

nature of expertise in my service learning experience. I volunteer at

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the Chinese Information and Service Center as an afterschool teachers

assistant/tutor for ELL fourth and fifth graders. In my position, the

moment of service delivery is me answering math and reading

questions, moving from one student to the next as needed. But the

actual social change only occurs if I can help bridge the gap and

provide an ELL student with what their recently-immigrated parents are

not able to: an understanding of the American education system and

why they are learning what they are learning. But that is where an

inner conflict arises. Coming from a non-ELL background and an

affluent public school district, with parents fluent in English and

graduated from American universities, I feel like I do not have the right

of expertise to teach these children about change. I can certainly try to

sympathize with their situations and teach off that, but not being able

to actually empathize makes me uncomfortable in that it just

augments how much privilege in education I have above them. In

reflecting on my own subjectivity in the context of these ELL children, I

wonder how I as a privileged outsider can get beyond service learning

to enact social change for them.

Works Cited

Cahill, Caitlin. The Personal is Political: Developing new subjectivities

through participatory action research. Gender, Place, and

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Culture. Routledge: Mortimer Street, London. Vol. 14, No. 3, pp.

267-292.

Sparks, Tony. Broke Not Broken: Rights, Privacy, and Homelessness in

Seattle. Urban Geography. Routledge: Mortimer Street, London.

31:6, 842-862.

Stephens, Christine. Privilege and Status in an Unequal Society:

Shifting the Focus of Health Promotion Research to Include the

Maintenance of Advantage. Journal of Health Psychology 15

(2010): 993, accessed May 1, 2014, doi:

10.1177/1359105310371554.